‘For All Mankind’ Star on Her Surprising Fate in Season 4 Finale: “The Only Allegiance Is to Great Storytelling”
[This story contains major spoilers from the season four finale of For All Mankind.]
Krys Marshall had a different ending in mind for NASA Commander Danielle Poole. It’s fitting since For All Mankind is revisionist history, after all.
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“It’s based on the premise of the Russians getting to the moon first, ahead of the Americans, and it sends our world into a place where the space race never ends,” explains Marshall of the Apple TV+ series. “Because of that, both technological advancements and social advancements continue in a way that they wouldn’t have had the space race been won by the U.S. The world as we know it is altered, I think, for the better.”
Her character began as one of a dozen female astronauts in 1969 and has grown over the four seasons of the Apple TV+ series — which span more than 30 years — to become a commander on Mars in 2003.
Ahead of the season four finale (released on Friday), Marshall talked with The Hollywood Reporter about adjusting to time jumps, learning her character’s fate and how a small role became a series lead.
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Can you talk a little bit about the structure of the time jumps over the first four seasons and the challenges of that?
We begin our story in 1969. In that season, we actually have a handful of years that elapse as we’re telling the story and catching the audience up to where we want to land, which is in 1974. Then we jump, I believe it’s nine years, and in season two we start off in 1983. It’s a really interesting storytelling technique of getting to truncate the time of not knowing the character and then knowing them really well in these seasons.
It’s like you spend eight years away from them, but then you spend a really intense two or three months in their lives over the course of each season. I can’t think of any other television show that has done the same concept from season to season the way that we’ve done it. You’ve seen it happen in movies, or you may see a flashback episode in a TV show. But for a series to go on for four, hopefully five, seasons and continue to do this — seeing their lead characters go from in their early 20s to, in my case, in their late 50s — I don’t think it’s ever been done before. It’s not a storytelling concept I’d ever even dreamed of. It’s been so much fun and also a crazy challenge to find ways to play the youthful side of her, which is much closer to me in real age, but then finding honesty and integrity in the versions of her that are getting older and older without having them feel campy and slapdash and overt.
How would you describe your character’s arc over the course of season four?
Danielle started season four really haunted by the choices she made when we left her in season three. Haunted by the decision to exile Danny, to nearly kill herself by sharing her rations with him. She did everything humanly possible to keep this kid alive and he died anyway. When we meet her at the top of season four, she’s doing what she can to pay her penance, to take her lashings. She’s there for his daughter at her ninth birthday, and she’s doing the best she can to be good to his family. She has so much guilt about his death. We then discover that her colleague, who was essentially her backbone, her saving grace, the Russian astronaut Kuz, he’s died in the asteroid accident and it is horrifying.
We see her as a woman on a mission who is going back to Mars to right so many wrongs. She’s filled with a lot of remorse and a lot of regret, and she’s doing what she can to do right by these people who are now on Mars at this colony that she was the first to start. Throughout the season, we see her trying her best to be the moral code in her world. Her aim to get it right sometimes means that she gets it wrong. Ultimately, it leads to her demise in the finale episode when we see that this gun that she buried years ago trying to do the right thing — trying to get this gun out of folks’ hands and bury it and leave that behind — is the gun that almost ends her life.
Are you glad that they didn’t just leave it as a question as to whether or not you were going to survive?
Believe it or not, I’m probably the only actor in Hollywood who wanted to get killed, and it’s because I love our show so much. Even though I don’t want Danielle to go and I love our world, I just thought that it was the best way to end her story with this whole heroic and horrific death. I had spoken to Matt [Wolpert] and [Ben Nedivi], our showrunners, and was like, I feel it in my bones. Danielle has to die. We spent all season long dancing around this idea of will-she-won’t-she. Finally, Ben calls me on a Saturday morning. He’s like, “I got bad news.” I’m thinking, okay, he’s going to tell me that she dies in a way that I didn’t expect. He’s like, “Yeah, Danielle lives.” And I’m like, “Noooooo!”
Obviously, I’m happy for her to continue because I just love our story and I love our world. I see now why they chose to do what they did. We have to say goodbye to Karen and Molly at the end of season three. Horribly, Tracy and Gordo died in season two. We’ve lost some really great pivotal series lead characters at the end of each season. I think they felt, in many ways, it was overt the choice to kill Danielle and also just too tough to swallow. So, I’m happy to see her live on.
What do you hope is in her future?
I don’t know what’s in store for Danielle. I could pretend that I have some ideas, but I’m sure they’re all going to be wrong. I would love to do it again. It’s just such a wild ride. Being on For All Mankind has been the opportunity of a lifetime. It has been so much fun, and it’s also so heartbreaking because in the ways that our audience feels like the moment you get to know someone and love someone, they’re taken from you, we feel the same way. Even if Danielle returns in season five — I hope that she does — I have no idea where her story will go, and if she’ll die in episode one. I just don’t know.
That would be funny if the showrunners were like, “Sorry, we didn’t kill you” and then you come back for season five and they’re like, “Ha! Got you! We did.”
Yeah, in episode one! [Laughs] Anything can happen like Game of Thrones. I think about some of the best shows on TV that historically just do not care. They don’t care about your allegiance to a character. They don’t care that this person is top of the call sheet, number one on the show. They don’t care. There is no allegiance to any of that. The only allegiance is to great storytelling, which is terrifying because it’s hard to see further than a few hundred feet in front of you, but that’s what makes it scary and fun.
What else do you have in the pipeline?
I did a pilot for FX called The Answers that was executive produced by Darren Aronofsky, and it was just so much fun. We shot in Vancouver and the experience was delightful. It was directed by Gillian Robespierre and the showrunner is Kit Steinkellner. It was just incredible to work with such great women who were really smart storytellers. I did a handful of episodes of a new series called Bad Monkey, which stars Vince Vaughn and Jodie Turner-Smith. That was created by Bill Lawrence, who of course co-created Ted Lasso along with Jason Sudeikis.
I also recently had a baby, which was really wonderful. That was during the industry strikes. So, I’ve had some downtime to just get acclimated to this new world, and it’s been a blast. Now the timing has worked out really perfectly that the engines are beginning. I’m hoping that we get our season five pickup sometime soon. I’m seeing nothing but open road ahead of me for 2024, and it feels really good.
Is there anything else that you really want people to know right now?
A thought that’s run through my mind a lot lately as I’ve been talking to folks about season four… I had so many limiting beliefs about what this all could look like. You leave drama school and you get out there, whether you’re in New York or L.A. and you’re trying to make this thing happen, and it’s tough to see folks around you having success and feeling like it will someday happen for you. I’ve mentioned many times in interviews that, when I audition for the role of Danielle, the character was only meant to be like a three-episode character, just a small little part. One of a dozen female astronauts who were in the early episodes. It wasn’t until I started to play her that our writers and showrunners saw something in me and something in my portrayal of her. Danielle grew. She grew from the lowly humble three episodes — now, in season four, she is the female series lead. I could not have seen that happen then.
It’s important to me to, I guess, demystify the work that we do and the feeling that one has to be discovered or plucked out of obscurity to someday become a star. I’m just hoping that people don’t just see Danielle, but see Krys — the actor who has been a journeyman on dozens of TV shows, playing this small part or that small part, but still playing them with honor and doing the best I can to service those stories. I feel like my story is a microcosm of what happens when you are the little engine that could. I’m really proud of the show, but I’m also really proud of myself and the journey that I’ve taken from episode three of season one all the way until this near hero’s death at the end of the season four finale.
You hear those one-in-a-million stories and it feels unattainable, but showing up and doing the work and doing it well, it’s nice to hear when that pays off.
Yeah, and we can all get behind that. You have these stories of like, “There I was pumping gas, humming a tune, and the head of Warner Bros. Music came over and gave me a record deal.” Maybe that does happen for some people, but for most people it doesn’t. It’s not so sexy or exciting, but it’s the facts that if you just stay with it, and you’re dogged, and you don’t give up, and you work your butt off, and you show up early and leave late, and you’re kind to people, and you work hard, good things will come. They really will. I think, for me, feeling that intuitively is very different than being able to see it in actuality. I’m just hopeful that my story — which is similar to Danielle’s story, being this sort of underdog and fighting way to the top — can inspire others to just stay with it.
For All Mankind season four is now streaming on Apple TV.
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