No one notices Mary Elizabeth Winstead at first as she steps into the elegant dining room of Moscow’s Hotel Metropol, an avatar of Jazz Age decadence in her black feather boa and backless dress. Her yapping dogs have raced ahead of her and are now scampering among terrified diners. Silverware clatters, and at least one guest is knocked to the floor. Heads turn to find the source of the commotion, while the culprit’s eyes sparkle with mischief.
These events are not unfolding in the actual Hotel Metropol, the Art Nouveau building just minutes from the Kremlin. Rather, this facsimile—a gilded lobby, endless nooks, and a labyrinth of rooms—was constructed in Space Studios in Manchester, England, as the setting for A Gentleman in Moscow, the limited-series adaptation of Amor Towles’s best-selling 2016 novel of the same name.
The eight-episode drama from show-runner Ben Vanstone (who was also the writer and show-runner for All Creatures Great and Small) debuts March 29 on Paramount+ with Showtime. It’s set in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution as tribunals and apparatchiks herald a grim new Soviet order. Outside the front doors of the Metropol, early-20th-century Russia convulses, but the grand hotel endures—its residents, guests, and servants comprising a society unto itself.
It’s the sort of self-contained world in which a gentleman can enjoy his brandy disconnected from the purges outside, while the lobby, lounge, and hallways teem with life. Among the cast of characters are diplomats, a young girl with a special key that gets her into any room of the hotel, and Winstead’s movie starlet, who makes her dramatic entrance in the show’s second episode.
We first see her from the back as she struts down the stairs that lead into the hotel’s dining room. She pauses to survey the unfolding chaos, then slips out of her wrap coat to reveal a showstopper of an evening dress. The instantly smitten Russian count Alexander Rostov (played by Winstead’s real-life husband, Ewan McGregor) rises from his table. They banter about her dogs, and she’s flirtatious in a way that feels like a performance within a performance. Everything from her disarming smile to the way she abruptly departs for some other corner of the Metropol leaves the poor count wanting more.
Winstead and McGregor met on the set of the FX series Fargo in 2016, began dating, and then welcomed their first child in 2021, before tying the knot in 2022. A Gentleman in Moscow represents their first joint screen project as a married couple, and it finds them essentially re-enacting the feeling of new love that they experienced themselves for real only a few years ago.
“The fact that we are so in love with one another, and we do kind of burst with feeling for each other all the time, made it really, really easy to bring all those layers to the relationship and to really see the relationship between the count and Anna develop,” Winstead says. “There were certain scenes where we’d go, O.K., we don’t actually have to cry in this scene—let’s pull it together! It was always so moving for us every day.” (Despite their relationship, the producers followed protocol and assigned the couple an intimacy coach to help choreograph their sex scenes.)
A Gentleman in Moscow represents their first joint screen project as a married couple, and it finds them essentially re-enacting the feeling of new love.
The hotel itself is also something of a character in its own right—as well as a prism through which to view successive eras of Soviet history. When the original Metropol opened, in 1905, it was a cosmopolitan wonder equipped with luxuries such as electricity, hot water, and telephones in the rooms. In 1917, however, it was the location of a battle that saw czarist forces stationed inside the hotel, fighting to keep the Bolsheviks from reaching the Kremlin.
Following the revolution, the Bolsheviks transformed the Metropol into the headquarters of a burgeoning Soviet bureaucracy. Eventually they decided to boot out those government workers and, in the 1930s, return the Metropol to its former glory (basically, to put on a show for Western visitors to ensure they didn’t get the wrong idea about the viability of Communism).
In Towles’s story, that history exists mostly at the margins, to keep the emphasis on his cavalcade of fictional hotel denizens. “We just wanted to live in it. It was so gorgeous,” Winstead says about the version of the hotel that was designed for the show. “The sets they built, they made it feel like it really was a hotel.”
Winstead’s most recent roles have tended to include either heroines or killers (she played the titular assassin in Netflix’s 2021 movie Kate), so portraying the headstrong Anna Urbanova also meant a refreshing change of pace.
Instead of training for fight scenes, Winstead found herself researching and learning from the lives of real-life Russian actresses who might have been contemporaries of Urbanova’s. “I really focused on Alla Nazimova, who was a huge Russian star in the 1920s and had ups and downs throughout her career that reminded me of Anna,” she says.
“She had many marriages and affairs, with both men and women, and was very bravely open and comfortable with her womanhood and sexuality. She also had a very difficult childhood and was abused by her father, so she left home at a young age to escape that. In our story, Anna’s backstory is kept quite mysterious because that’s how she likes it, but there is a heavy history there that can be felt.”
Everything from her disarming smile to the way she abruptly departs for some other corner of the Metropol leaves the poor count wanting more.
McGregor, by the way, is the “gentleman” of the title, a man for whom the pleasures of life are as much of a movable feast as the practicalities and routines to which he commits himself. His Count Rostov lives in a cramped room on the sixth floor of the hotel, where the Bolsheviks have banished him in lieu of jail or a bullet to the head. It was for the crime of simply being an aristocrat at the time of the czars; he’s declared, henceforth, a “former person.” His punishment: lifetime house arrest at the Metropol.
Optimists can make the best of almost any kind of deprivation—even a hotel room devoid of creature comforts and with bedsprings that creak so loudly Rostov can identify the tone (G-sharp). Stripped of his freedom, the count refuses to succumb to his diminished circumstances and instead appreciates life’s simple pleasures and all the people he encounters, such as the beautiful Urbanova. In doing so, he outwits the system responsible for his confinement.
“I think when you read the book,” Winstead says, “one of the things that stands out is just this spirit in the face of real tragedy. I think that Ewan really captures that so well in his performance, and I think that sort of has a trickle effect throughout the show. A lot of characters have that sense of strength in adversity. Life carries on, and you find humor and laughter and hope in the darkest of places. ”
McGregor has already begun praising his wife’s performance to reporters, and Winstead needs no prompting to return the favor. “I feel like I could talk for hours about how amazing he is, even when I was just home with him as his partner and seeing his commitment to it and the way that he embodied this person like nobody else could,” she says about McGregor’s preparation. He worked with a movement coach to nail the mannerisms and bearing of the leisured class, and maintained his character’s thick, nobleman’s mustache for nearly a year.
“I loved it at first!,” Winstead says with a laugh about the facial hair. “But eventually I wanted to see his face again.”
A Gentleman in Moscow will begin streaming on Paramount Plus on March 29
Andy Meek is a Memphis-based journalist who covers media, entertainment, and culture