ALTERED CARBON Gets The Lead (Actor) Out
Variety reports that the new Netflix series Altered Carbon, based on the novel by Richard K. Morgan, now has a lead actor and a director for at least the first episode.
Joel Kinnaman (Robocop, House of Cards) will star as Takeshi Kovacs, a former elite combat trooper known as an Envoy. Kovacs has been a prisoner for five hundred years, and now has a chance at a new life on Earth if he can solve a murder in a future where technology has rendered death nearly obsolete.
Laeta Kalogridis will write and executive produce along with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Marcy Ross for Skydance Television. Kalogridis (Birds of Prey, Terminator Genysis) will also act as showrunner.
Kinnaman will next be seen as Rick Flag in the highly anticipated Suicide Squad, which opens August 5th.
Altered Carbon is set in the 25th century, a “hardboiled cyberpunk” novel that won the Philip K. Dick Award for Best Novel in 2003. Kovacs is a native of Harlan’s World, a planet settled by Japanese conglomerates using Eastern European labor to build their colony. In this future, technology exists that allows a person to be downloaded to a cortical stack in the spinal column, allowing them to cheat death and install their personalities in new bodies known as “sleeves”.
Arguing against the process, Catholics refuse to be stored in stacks, leaving them targets for murder, since the victim won’t remain to be put into a new body to testify. Kovacs is hired to investigate the apparent murder of Laurens Bancroft, who has been re-sleeved from a backup copy, leaving a 48-hour gap in his memory.
The series will be ten episodes, and Miguel Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) is set to direct the first episode.
Altered Carbon is followed by two sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies.
