In 2019, For All Mankind charted an alternate timeline, beginning in a different version of 1969 where NASA lost the space race to the Moon. Since then, each subsequent season has jumped forward by about a decade, meaning some of our fictional pioneering astronauts — like Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) — were much older by Season 4. Now, with the upcoming Season 5 jumping to 2012, and new cast members already getting announced, it’s very possible that the next phase of For All Mankind will feel like an even bigger reboot than previous seasons. Because at this point, we could be looking at a lot of new faces, so many, that it could feel like an entirely new cast.
Recently, Deadline revealed that Mireille Enos (Hanna) will join the cast of For All Mankind Season 5 where she’ll play “Celia Boyd, a member of the Peacekeeper Security Force on Mars.” Beyond that, the report reveals nothing new about the show’s upcoming plot.
By now, fans of For All Mankind know that any new casting tends to be pretty significant. Interestingly, new cast member Enos previously starred in a Danish crime drama with Joel Kinnaman, who has, for four seasons, been the defacto lead of For All Mankind as veteran astronaut Ed Baldwin. But in Season 4, Ed was somewhere around 80 years old, making fans wonder if he would appear in Season 5 at all. In 2023, when Inverse asked series creator Ronald D. Moore about the fact that several characters were getting too old to realistically be huge parts of the show, he replied: “I mean you could potentially have a new cast... But I think characters can evolve and change. And medical technology in our alternate history changes too. So who knows how long Ed will last.”
That said, showrunners Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert also told Inverse in 2023, that nobody is getting put in suspended animation from previous seasons and that, at that time, they “[couldn’t] completely reveal who will and will be around for Season 5.” In the same interview, Wolpert and Nedivi also made it clear that the very nature of For All Mankind meant that, inherently, at a certain point, none of the original cast from Season 1 would remain. “By the time we get to seasons 5, 6, 7, you don't want it to be about 120-year-old astronauts,” they said.
As of now, the only character who appeared in Season 1 and could still be a major force in Season 5 is Danielle, simply because she was roughly 59 in Season 4, meaning she’ll be in her early 70s in Season 5. Ed will probably be in his 90s, so even if he’s around, it’s unlikely he’ll be a major player in the show unless we’re dealing with flashbacks to Seasons 1 or 2. However, it feels more likely that ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s flashbacks are being saved for the spin-off series, Star City, which tells the existing story of the show from the Soviet perspective.
So, we don’t have any clue who Mireille Enos is playing in For All Mankind, but as of now, it’s a good bet that this new face in Season 5 won’t be the last. Because when For All Mankind returns, the series will be entering its literal fourth generation since the show began.
