Sean Kaufman has had an eventful last few years on the small screen, with a role on The Summer I Turned Pretty making him a familiar face for countless viewers with an Amazon Prime subscription. Now that the book-to-screen adaptation of the teen romance is over, he has moved on to a very different series in a very different genre: For All Mankind, recently returned to Apple TV+ for Season 5 in the 2026 TV schedule. The actor spoke with CinemaBlend about what he wanted to do differently after TSITP, and I truly get where he’s coming from after all the love triangle drama.
For All Mankind’s fifth season delivered another time jump that meant some roles needed to be recast, with the showrunners even sharing what they’ve struggled to come to terms with in leaving eras behind. The jump ahead to 2012 meant that young Alex needed to be replaced by an older Alex, with Kaufman coming on board as the son of Cynthy Wu’s Kelly Baldwin.
I won’t get into spoilers here, but if you’ve checked out the Season 5 premiere with an Apple TV+ subscription after the launch on March 27, you’ll know that For All Mankind’s Alex definitely isn’t The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Steven 2.0. Both shows can definitely be fun to watch, and there's no harm in some entertaining fictional drama on the small screen, but the two series perhaps don't have the same target demographic.
When I spoke with the actor at SCAD TVfest in Atlanta, I had to know: what was it like for him to go through a big tonal shift from the love triangles and messy drama of TSITP to the more serious sci-fi of For All Mankind? He shared:
It's fun. One rule that I made for myself as an actor is live in the feeling of being uncomfortable. I think anytime I can be uncomfortable, I know I'm doing the right thing. I think comfort is kind of the death of an artist, and I think that going from a tone like that to another kind of tone, it was fun.
Kaufman hasn’t totally left the “tone” of TSITP behind, as he’s expected to appear in the Summer I Turned Pretty movie, and it remains to be seen if the time jump ahead to the sixth and final season of For All Mankind will be short enough for him to keep playing Alex. But he’s reveling in playing something more “uncomfortable” after a role he was able to inhabit for three full seasons, as he went on:
I felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants. There was a lot of stuff that I was learning on the fly and I didn't know, and I think that there was something about that where I was like, 'This is awesome.' The fact that I don't know, and I feel like the best actors are sponges, and I feel like if I can be a sponge and absorb new knowledge, that's a dream come true.
Like many actors, Sean Kaufman had to put in his time playing much smaller guest roles before he landed a series regular role on a project. For him, that includes projects like one episode of Jared Padalecki’s Walker, two different characters on CBS’ FBI: Most Wanted, two episodes of Manifest, and of course Law & Order: SVU’s Grieving Male Student #1 on NBC.
Kaufman laughed at the reference to Grieving Male Student #1 when I brought it up, and went on to share how it feels to have come so far with regular roles on TSITP and now For All Mankind:
It's surreal, I think. I feel a sense of pride with those credits. It's such a joke, obviously, but the New York City, like Law and Order-route, everybody starts there. But there's a reason. It's because it's a rite of passage. It's like you have to understand how the machine works sometimes, and the best part of that is just being like a small cog in it. So it's surreal to be where I'm at now. I feel so grateful because of those experiences. You know, I'll always remember them.
He’s certainly not wrong about the Law & Order world as a “rite of passage,” as there’s a long list of actors who appeared in the franchise as more than one character before hitting it big in showbiz, including Pedro Pascal, David Harbour, and Ellen Pompeo. Maybe starting out as Grieving Male Student #1 was exactly the kind of early role he needed before landing series regular gigs.
You can find him as Alex in For All Mankind with new episodes of Season 5 releasing Fridays on Apple TV+ until the finale in late May, after which the streamer will begin releasing Star City as the drama’s spinoff focusing on the Soviet Union rather than American side of the alternate universe version of the space race.
