A brand new still of Mary and Ewan in their upcoming series ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ has been released via Empire. Set in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov (played by Ewan McGregor) is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. If he ventures beyond the hotel’s walls, he’ll be shot and killed—and so inside he stays, dining and grooming and sleeping and chatting away with anyone and everyone in his vicinity. Mary will play Anna Urbanova, a glamorous, independent and self-made film actress, at the height of her fame. She uses her wit and beauty to dazzle Count Alexander Rostov. She’s an enigmatic character who keeps her cards very close to her chest. Reluctant to reveal her true self.
“In-between takes we were just bawling our eyes out,” Winstead chuckles, looking back on a particularly tender sequence. “It was so beautiful to get to play the scene and make that moment feel so real. But it was really, really hard for us as well.” With a backdrop of world-changing politics, there are plenty of forces that threaten to keep the Count and Anna apart. “It’s about the making of the Russia that we know now,” states McGregor of the series. “It starts in 1921 after the Revolution, and everybody’s in turmoil. There’s a lot of discussion about belief in something – people who believe in the Communist movement and people who don’t, and what it does to their lives.”
A Gentleman in Moscow will begin streaming on Paramount+ March 29th.