“It started with being desperate to find out what happens to people after they come back from space, after they’ve seen the Earth beneath them, and been completely separate from anything they’ve ever known,” Constellation series creator, writer, and executive producer Peter Harness explained about the origins of the Apple TV+ Original during a TCA press conference. The series is a psychological thriller about an astronaut who returns to Earth after a disaster in space only to find the life she thought she knew has changed. The series may be fiction, but there’s a kernel of truth to many of its elements. “There were these odd, little, spooky stories about what astronauts go through in space. They do hear dogs barking, and sometimes they see weird things outside the capsules. And I thought that’s a sci-fi show, but that has spooky elements in it as well, and that leads almost naturally into a conspiracy about facts being covered up.”
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Noomi Rapace stars as Jo, the central astronaut in the series, who was able to lean on her own experience as an actor to get into Jo’s headspace. “We go away on shoots, and we transform,” she explained. “We train really hard, we're separated from our families and our kids. So it's this terrible feeling when you come back, and it's like, have I been away too long? Did I push it too far? My dream and my love for my work that I'm so committed to and I'm ready to go really deep and really far, but to what cost? For me, this series really asked that to everyone. I started looking at my own life and looking back at my choices. We are our choices, we are our decisions, and what is real? We create our own reality and if we lose connection with the ones we have closest, what is worth anything then?”
While location shoots often take actors away from home, the Constellation team thankfully remained terrestrial. “We had a system that was built on the ceiling of the stage that allowed these guys to be on wires and they could go backward and forwards and sideways in both directions,” revealed director and executive producer Michelle Maclaren about how zero gravity scenes were achieved. “They also had rolling chairs that they would balance on or they had a chair that they would actually lie on, on their bellies. But the amazing thing was, as soon as you get like this, then they could mime. And so, they're having to act while they're working with all these different contraptions or miming like they're in zero-G and these guys could do it brilliantly. I mean, Noomi's stomach muscles must be so rock-hard at this point. And to perform such beautiful performances while doing this.” While they couldn’t achieve an actual loss of gravity on set, the set itself was an exact replica of the International Space Station, which added another layer of complexity to the shoot. “The ISS is built for people who float, not walk on, so it was very tricky to shoot in. We had to bring platforms in and out. We’d break pieces of the set away. But we shot it as practical as possible.”
“It's this huge, epic, global story, but it actually comes down to a pretty intimate family drama at its heart,” shared James D’Arcy, who plays Jo’s husband Magnus. “We have Noomi's character, Jo, desperately trying to reconnect with her child but there's the whole family unit there. And what Peter did brilliantly was he took this family, and as soon as you meet them all together, something seems weird already. They're not having a great time, you can see that instantly. And then, every fifteen minutes, he just turned the screw a little more. I love that up against the backdrop of this big sci-fi, you actually saw a family in extremes. And I felt like that was pretty universal, the feelings that that generated.”
Will Catlett plays another astronaut, Paul Lancaster, sharing his own reasons for signing onto the series. “It's the raw emotions that every human being deals with, like regret and grief and how do you get through it,” he explained, adding that this show is not a passive experience for the audience. “Not only are you watching it, it's going to actually watch you. You're going to go on an inward journey. You're going to deal with some of those things when Paul comes back home. You've been in a place where you kiss your wife, but you still feel distance. Or you'll hear things like, well, I just need time, or I just need space, and every human being deals with those things. And Peter did a great job of using space as the backdrop, but he's really trying to talk to you, the viewer.”
You can watch Constellation, and it can watch you back, only on Apple TV+. The first three episodes are now streaming, with new episodes released on Wednesdays.