Cold War Espionage Has Never Looked As Good As It Does In ‘PONIES’

From the opening scene of PONIES, Moscow in 1976, from the first moment we see a gorgeous weave in a character’s tie, it is obvious that Peacock’s new series, created and co-written by Susanna Fogel and David Ireson, is dedicated to every detail.

In a world where costs and corners are routinely cut it is a treat to see such excellent work executed in a manner that makes it obvious how much time and attention were dedicated to achieving excellence.

I met with the series costume designer, Anastasia Magoutas, and production designer, Sara K. White, for a conversation about their work on this new series, how they worked together to make opposing factions of Cold War spies feel like real people, not hokey caricatures.

PONIES is the fourth time that White and Magoutas have worked with series co-creator and co-writer, Susanna Fogel. Past experience has taught this writer that when people choose to work with each other time and again, it’s basically always because the experience is so positive. Since respect and clear communication are so vitally important to telling stories on film, it was not exactly surprising to discover that this series was even more enjoyable than the previews led me to hope it might be.

“It was a nice little family reunion experience,” the production designer told me, when I asked about working together again. “When we first started talking about this project, which was a couple of years before it finally got greenlit, the idea of approaching the aesthetics of the era and the location was something that was really important, to sort of turn that on its head because we’re talking about the Cold War in Moscow. Often there’s a color palette that’s associated with that that has more to do with the political propaganda versus what was actually the reality of the lived experience at the time. And it was important for us to be more responsive to that lived experience, which helped us play into the tone of the show, which was also really important to Susanna and David Ireson, the co-creators of the show.”

“Once we started getting into it,” White continued, “it was fun to really run wild, because there’s so much pattern and color that’s period appropriate. And we were able to bounce off of each other in that. Something that Anastasia and I have experienced many times now is coming to a scene or a character with the same understanding of what the colors of that person or the tone of that scene is going to be, and bringing sometimes matching ideas to the fore. We’re very simpatico in that.”

“Color is a way Sarah and I both think,” costume designer Anastasia Magoutas said, “we really think in colors. We’ve had multiple scenarios where we’ll ask each other first, like, ‘hey, what color is the wall in this room? Because I’ve got her in a purple sweater.’ And she’s like, ‘I did paint the wall purple today.’ It’s great that we agree this is a purple scene, that the mood of the scene is purple. If Sarah and I have done the same thing, that’s how I know we’re on the right path. We can adjust from there, to decide whether or not matching is the right thing, or whether or not the person should stand out or not. But it’s perfect when we agree on what this is about and who this person is and what is happening in the scene, it’s a great starting point for us.”

Lady Spies

PONIES focuses on Bea Grant (Emilia Clarke) and Twila Hasback (Haley Lu Richardson), the wives of CIA operatives stationed in the capital of what was then the USSR. When the husbands die the ladies refuse to be sidelined and go home, insisting that they can help unravel the mystery of what happened. All of this is shown in bright, beautiful colors and tones. This is not the drab, washed-out Soviet world that we are used to seeing in television and film, and the distinction very much makes a difference.

After watching the first season of PONIES, I wanted to know about that choice, how and why the production chose the route it took to tell this story.

“One of the very first things we all agreed on was that the script and the characters have so much energy and the tone has so much energy,” Magoutas told me. “There are a lot of really charming personalities in the show. And so, nothing could or should have been drab, whether you wanted to say something about the Soviet Union being sad or not, our show is just not a drab show in any sense. When I was doing research, one of the themes that I found most interesting was the idea of the Cold War, as seen from both sides. What is each group telling themselves about the other? I was really interested in the concept of competition between the USSR and America at the time. I really wanted to show that the Soviet Union was not just sitting back and being like, ‘oh, poor us in our rags, we will beat the capitalistic foe that is America.’ They really had a point to prove, they were like, ‘we look great. Our art is great. Our clothes are wonderful, our women are beautiful. That was really important to them, to show how good their lives supposedly were.”

Of course there was desperation and very real poverty in the Soviet Union during the era this story takes place in, and the makers of this show very much understand that. But that is not the way the USSR wanted to be seen, and it is definitely not what they would have let American visitors see.

“It’s like they have to keep up appearances,” Magoutas told me. “It was important to the characters in the show, who are Soviet, to not feel or appear demoralized, because it was important to the propaganda of the time, so that foreigners who are visiting thought that everyone in Moscow looked pretty good.”

“Like, the food in the restaurants was great, the look of those restaurants, the glamour,” White added. “I mean, in one of our episodes, we have a representative from Coca Cola coming over to see about opening that corporation into Russia. We see Elton John coming over. And these are big key players, coming to experience Russia and decide whether to invest in the region, to try to bring their products, try to expand the culture in. No one’s going to bring them to a place that doesn’t have anything but borscht; they were wining and dining them, and we did the same thing. It was really important to show both sides of that. We were cross pollinating a lot more simply because of the human condition, more than people like to imagine.”

Color is Vital in This Spy Story

In a story about spies, one packed with secrets and lies and manipulation, it is hard not to wonder what is a clue for the audience and what might be a red herring. As my regular readers will know, there is information that cannot be trusted to mere words in any production; there are infinite times and places where dialogue, narration or exposition would kill the Movie Magic. These are the moments when communication with the viewer is entrusted to the creative departments behind the camera.

For costume and production designers to meet this need, mutual respect is required, they must communicate effectively and come together to serve the story. PONIES is an excellent example of how skillfully that can be done. There are myriad examples, like the use of patterns, which we see on clothing and accessories as often as we see them on sets and props.

“There was a meaning behind the boldness of colors,” White told me with a smile.

“We have such a similar understanding of how we wanted to translate these ideas, ” Magoutas explained. “In our warehouse, we had two separate stocks, we had American people stock, and we had Soviet people stock, and all clothes that came into the warehouse got divided into one or the other. One of the guidelines that I had set was that American patterns should be more orderly, they should be a little crisper, bolder in a geometric sense. If there was a stripe on an American person, it should have no more than three or four colors. If there was a stripe with like, eight colors in it, that was a Soviet stripe and for them we used busier or slightly more chaotic patterns. I think a theme of the show is that the Soviet government, and that way of life, felt a bit obtuse to the American characters. Whereas, any pattern that an American character wore was a little more straightforward, a little more by the rules, a little easier to digest to the eye.”

This continues beyond what the characters wear, we see it in the personal spaces they inhabit, and we see how the personalities of each character refine the rooms they live within.

“For Bea and Twila,” White told me, “they were very much in contrast to each other in the way that they approached the world. In their expectations for the way they would live their lives, what their like 10-year-plan was; which is to say that Bea has one and Twila does not. So with their respective home environments, Bea has been there a little bit longer, but it was very important for her to set up the feeling of home. And she took that domestic role very seriously, which is something that we see in the first episode and in part of the first sequence, where she’s trying, desperately, in this country that she doesn’t know with resources she can’t understand, to create the perfect American cake. Bea wants very much to deliver that, to both impress the people that her husband works with and to make them see him as valuable, and then by extension her as valuable. And Twila does not feel those things at all.”

“She does have a floral pattern in her bedroom,” the production designer continued, “but it’s a more geometric floral, it doesn’t have the soft and intricate spirals that Bea’s florals have. And later, when we’re in Ray and Cheryl’s apartment, Cheryl’s definitely the one who has decorated, and it has a real boldness about it. There are hints and nods to the fact that not only has she been there longer. So some of the palette and materiality that comes into her apartment is much more part of the Soviet Union, is reflective of some of the materials and palettes that we see in the Soviet Union spaces, because they have come in and affected her home. And that was really exciting to put together.”

Mixing History into Fiction

The bathhouses, places that feel a bit exotic from a twenty-first century American perspective, were another part of this series that felt vital and important to the narrative, both the rooms which make them up and what the characters moving through them wear. It would have been very easy for the literal steam which obfuscates the view to feel like a blunt instrument, but the work of Magoutas and White is as intentional as it is elegant. We see exactly what they want us to see, nothing more and nothing less.

“The first bathhouse that we used was one that was built in Budapest,” White explained, “and had a very Hungarian flair to it. But it was bombed during World War One. The Soviets that occupied the territory after that rebuilt that bathhouse, the pools that we see in that sequence, were rebuilt by the Soviet Union. It’s very, very spot on, as far as it being appropriate to period and appropriate to place. And when we’re in our later bathhouse, it’s a traditional, Ottoman Turkish bathhouse that was constructed centuries ago. The connection between the Soviet Union and the Turkish and Ottoman Empire was very strong, there is a lot of overlap there. So we were really excited to explore both of those things. And the things happening in both of those spaces, in those scenes, I think it ties really well into the look of it, when we go with Twila into that first steam sauna. And then we’re deep in the bowels of the KGB when we go back.”

“Costume wise,” Magoutas explained, “the interior of a bathhouse was almost impossible to research. I think, between the two of us, we found one image, which we actually sent to each other. It was an image of women bathing, and they had these really colorful swimsuits and funny swimming caps that were over the top and kitschy in a 1970s way. We felt like that was a fun thing to have for that scene to intensify the humor of Twila, that they’re fully clothed and on this weird mission, and they obviously don’t know what they’re doing. But one of the fortunate things about shooting in Hungary was that there were people in my department who were alive during Hungary’s Soviet period, and they have a huge bathhouse culture over there. I was lucky enough to be able to literally ask my costume supervisor what people wore to the bathhouses in the 1970s. I had some pretty cool primary research, from a person who was there.”

Creative Collaboration Makes Movie Magic

Without giving anything away, midway through the show there’s a fabulous series of events revolving around a painting, and it really demonstrates the accomplishments achieved here through collaboration between the art and costume departments. Before we left our conversation, I told the ladies I very much wanted to know more about it.

“It was really fun to pull together,” White said. “It was something that we collaborated with showrunner David Ireson on, and he had very specific ideas. He wanted to make sure that we used a Russian artist, and he wanted it to feel bold, modern, and new and fresh in a way that was perhaps surprising to the American audience. Bea and Twila are starting to realize that they’re smarter than their bosses, then they can find ways to accomplish the tasks, the objectives, by using their own strengths, which may not be familiar to their bosses, because their bosses are used to dealing with a certain kind of man, an American man.”

“The idea that the painting is of women,” Magoutas said, “that they’re looking right at it and don’t even see what is happening, it’s literally the theme of the show. Bea and Twila both have costume arcs I had in mind, I knew the journey they were going to go on. They were going to start one place, there was going to be a middle point, and they were going to end the season somewhere else. Bea’s journey was from shelteredness, a little bit of naivete, kind of like a hometown girl who doesn’t know what’s about to hit her. And she evolves into a person who is owning their abilities, some aspects of her personality that she may have thought were taboo, or that shouldn’t be seen by anyone and putting those parts of her forward and embracing them. Going against what she thought she was supposed to be and where her life was supposed to go.”

“Twila’s journey is starting off subculture, a self proclaimed misfit, like, ‘I do not belong to any culture and I rebel against all things that are expected of me.’ But she’s almost overdoing that and the chip on her shoulder about the experiences in her life, how she’s been wronged by the world and the people around her. She has a shell around her, a hardness and, to the point where she almost wants to be offensive. She finds a path, a way to use her power, that is more controlled, more focused and more purposeful. In the beginning, we see her and she’s just got all this energy flying out of her. It’s directionless. It’s rough. But she finds a way to hone all of those ‘personality flaws’ of hers, turns them into power and a skill when she understands that she’s really good at this. By engaging more with spy work, they come both towards a middle, where they both gain a little bit of something that they needed by engaging in this work. This is a middle point for both of them.”

‘PONIES’, created and co-written by Susanna Fogel and David Ireson, featuring production design by Sara K. White and costumes by Anastasia Magoutas, is available to stream on Peacock beginning on January 19, 2026.

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