“They were the punk rockers of space travel,” declares Rhys Ifans. That’s the Welshman’s assessment of the Soviet space programme, the details of which he delved into for his intriguing new thriller, Star City, which imagines what might have happened had the Russians beaten the Americans to win the space race and never stopped venturing out into the stars. Delving into the culture of secrecy and surveillance that defined a certain era of the Soviet Union, the “paranoid” thriller follows the cosmonauts, engineers and intelligence officers in Star City, the military town at the heart of the Russian space programme. Actor Ifans is at the centre of it all, starring as the brains behind the space programme, the mysterious nameless man only ever referred to as the “Chief Designer”. Despite the series being a spin-off of sci-fi For All Mankind, and many of the storylines being imagined, plenty of astonishing details are plucked straight from Soviet history, including the Chief Designer himself, whose identity had to be kept secret at any cost. Speaking exclusively to …