EXCLUSIVE: Rivals star Alex Hassell and Contagion‘s Jennifer Ehle have joined the cast of First Woman, the lunar thriller series we revealed news of last week.

They will appear alongside stars Andrea Riseborough and Ashley Walters in the six-part drama, which comes ITV Studios-owned Mammoth Screen, Alcon Television and Germany’s ZDF.

The series, from Lydia Yeoman and George Oakes, follows Claire Reith (Riseborough), a biologist in a groundbreaking research project and the first woman to set foot on the moon, who disappears, throwing suspicion on her fellow astronauts and a rival Chinese base. Thousands of miles away on Earth, her husband, Ben (Walters), searches for the truth. The action switches between Mission Control and the lunar surface as the race against time builds.

Ehle will play Helen Sadler, an investigator with UK Space Flight Authority who is tasked with uncovering what happened to Claire. Sceptical that the astronaut left the lunar module of her own freewill, she begins an enquiry that exposes secrets within Mission Control.

Hassell will play UK Prime Minister Christopher Scott, a polish and pragmatic centrist politician who believes Britain must compete on the global stage. As the crisis deepens, his position becomes increasingly precarious and he has to decide how far he will go for his personal ambitions.

Filming is underway in Belfast, with support from Northern Ireland Screen. Studio Ulster, the UK’s largest virtual production facility, is being used for the moon base and lunar landscape. Yeoman (Curfew) is writing alongside George Oakes, who had the original idea, and Ben Schiffer. Unit VFZ is working closely with Mammoth Screen and Alcon on visual effects, while Poli Productions is working with director Philip Martin and production designer Gillian Devenney on the lunar vistas.

Mammoth Screen’s Damien Timmer is exec producing alongside James Gandhi, Martin, Oakes and Yeoman. Mammoth Screen’s Creative Director Rebecca Keane oversaw development. ITV’s Director of Drama, Polly Hill, who commissioned the show for ITV1, ITVX, STV and STV Player, will oversee the production from the broadcaster’s perspective. Broderick Johnson, Andrew Kosove, Scott Parish, Diego Piasek, Steven Johnson and Ben Roberts serve as EPs for Alcon, which is co-financing the series alongside distributor ITV Studios.

Ehle is known for her role in the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride and Prejudice, for which she won a BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress, and has film credits for the likes of The King’s Speech, Zero Dark Thirty, the Fifty Shades movies, Contagion and She Said. On the TV front, she appeared in NBC’s The Blacklist, CBS’s The Good Fight, Showtime miniseries The The Comey Rule and Prime Video’s Dead Ringers. On stage, she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and won a Tony for another Stoppard collaboration, The Coast of Utopia. More recently, she was cast in Paramount+’s 1923 and appeared in Mark Pellington’s conspiracy thriller Lone Wolf.

Hassell is known for his role of rakish former Olympic showjumper-turned-politician Rupert Campbell-Black in Disney+ ‘bonkbuster’ Rivals, which is set to return for a second season this year. He has also appeared in BBC series Bonkers, BBC-PBS co-production The Miniaturist, Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop, HBO’s His Dark Materials, Netflix’s Everything Now and Prime Video’s The Boys. On the big screen, he had roles in George Clooney’s Suburbicon, Netflix’s Locked In and David Jonsson-starrer Wasteman.