For All Mankind's Most Important Character Is The Key To The Future

When Coral Peña auditioned for the Apple TV epic For All Mankind, the future of the show was unknown. In 2022, she told Inverse that at one point, the show floated an “alternate ending” which would have shown Aleida in the distant future. Now, two seasons later, we’re almost there. Peña is in her early 30s in real life, but in the alternate 2012 of For All Mankind Season 5, Aledia is firmly in her early 50s, running ground control from the Titan mission from Mars. “When Aleida went to space before, that was a blip. This is the real deal,” Peña tells Inverse. “The astronauts are like the jocks. But Aleida doesn’t want to be a jock. She wants to be a nerd.”

Though Aleida and Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) felt more like secondary characters back in Season 3, by Season 4, this next generation became the old guard, which is doubly true in Season 5. That said, for Peña, the crucial difference is that in previous seasons, a lot of the older actors were still a huge part of the show. But now, Peña is the For All Mankind veteran.

“I think Cynthy felt this, too. I remember joining in Season 2, and it's terrifying to join a show in its second season, especially one that's not even out yet. I was working based off of other people telling me about my character, and it was overwhelming, and you feel like you just want to blend in, and you don't want anyone to know you're in the room,” Peña reveals. “But having people like Wrenn [Schmidt], Joel [Kinnaman], and Sarah Jones, Chantel Van Stanton, Jodi Balfour, Krys Marshall, these people really made me feel like I deserved to be there. Cynthy and I are trying to pass that feeling on to the new people: you’re here because you deserve to be.”

In Season 4, Aleida’s only link to the past is visiting Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) in prison, something she leaves behind when she has to head to Mars to take control. Now, although she’s one of the younger actors on the show, Peña is playing 20 years older and is very much a quick-witted Gen X woman you don’t want to mess with. Aleida may have learned how to run a mission control from Margo, but Margo didn’t have to do her job while an occupying force was pulling out guns. Aleida’s mission control on Mars (MOCC) is way more stressful.

“I think Aleida is really good at grounding herself in high-stress situations,” Peña explains. “She’s been doing it for several decades! I think her focus on the Titan mission is really because everything else is so out of her control, is so scary, but this is the one thing that she's good at. It's a glimmer of hope for everyone. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel for her.”

Thanks to Aleida’s perseverance and Kelly’s last-minute moxy, Sojourner does land on Saturn’s moon Titan in Episode 7, “The Sirens of Titan.” But in Episode 8, “Brave New World,” Aleida is still navigating a tense standoff on Mars. The stakes are very high, and the future is unclear.

When you consider that the younger version of Aleida (Olivia Trujillo) is literally in the opening scenes of the very first episode of Season 1, crossing the Mexican border in 1969, with her family as the Moon landing occurs, it’s truly hard to imagine any of this without her. Aledia isn’t just one of the most entertaining characters in For All Mankind (“I try to make her funny,” Peña says), she’s also one of the most consequential characters in the series. But with one more season to go, in which Aleida will likely be in her 60s (with Peña playing double her own age), what is the endgame for this brave human? Will we get some far-future version of Aleida after all?

“Well, listen, I can't say. The finale hasn't happened. I can't say if I'm in Season 6, or not,” Peña teases. “But what I will say is that I always knew that they [the showrunners] had this vision of these locks of silver hair in space. I held that image with me, knowing that they had big goals for Aleida and all that she could achieve. It was a guiding image for me.”

For All Mankind streams on Apple TV.