Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” is cruising into the final episodes of its fifth season, and these are restless times for the Martian settlement of Happy Valley as conflicts mount. We’ve got irate workers rebelling against automation, Earth’s M-6 sending marines to reclaim the Goldilocks asteroid, food supplies running low, and a Titan mission seeking out alien life.
Portraying down on her luck security officer and a member of Happy Valley’s Mars Peacekeeper Force, Mireille Enos’ (“The Killing”) Celia Boyd has quickly become one of the sci-fi series’ most compelling characters while she finds herself in the thick of conflicts erupting on the Red Planet.
“Story always wins,” Enos tells Space regarding her casting. “You always just want to be telling good stories. But I’d been telling myself that I really don’t want to play anymore cops for a while. I’d done that and I got to do that in a really elegant way. Then the guys came and said they’d love for me to be a cop on Mars. I said, ‘You guys, I don’t want to be a cop.’ We started a creative dialogue and the thing that was very interesting to me about her is that ultimately she is very skilled, and she believes in herself at the beginning, but she’s not good at her job.”
Despite the cool red beret worn by the settlement’s law enforcement unit, Boyd is an underdog whose past decisions haven’t been the smartest. And yet, she’s tenacious and fans have watched her evolve over the course of the season to play a pivotal role in revolts and Free Mars uprisings.
“She doesn’t want a promotion or any attention. She’s just trying to stay under the radar. How do you build a person who’s not trying to reach for anything, yet the moments that unfold in front of her, she can’t help but continue to step through those doors?” muses Enos. “What’s the key to why she steps through those doors? It’s her moral compass and it’s her inability to keep her mouth shut in the face of ignorance, injustice, and people being bad at their job. Historically it’s gotten her in a lot of trouble. Yet, for whatever reason, in this moment in her life, on this crazy red planet, it’s what sets her on her hero’s journey. And that’s very interesting.”
The Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actress admits to loving a good wardrobe fitting to discover exactly what her character is all about.
“From the short hair to the clothes, I kept asking our costume designer Esther Marquis to bring in boxier shapes, more masculine, more heavy, to try embody that sense of her trying to hide and not draw attention to herself,” Enos adds. “The weight of the shoes, the belt, all of that was helpful in tapping into her toughness, but mostly she was trying to hide inside of this role. She’s a very different creature than me.”
Enos is no stranger to the sci-fi genre as she co-starred opposite Brad Pitt in 2013’s “World War Z”, and grew up watching “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” with her older brothers.
“I remember watching ‘The Wrath of Khan’ and watching Spock die and feeling impacted by that,” she recalls.
“Science fiction is wonderful. I feel like it taps into all our childhood sense of play. Like when we were little, sitting in cardboard boxes and drawing buttons with markers and pretending to be in a spaceship. That question of what’s bigger than us? What’s beyond? This show is so meticulous. The art direction and everyone’s commitment to making the world as real as possible. They built a real spaceship and taught me how to fly it! It’s just really fun.”
“For All Mankind” Season 5 is now streaming exclusively on Apple TV.