Live Action COWBOY BEBOP Announces Cast
The live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop from Netflix has found its villain and most of the crew of the good ship Bebop.
His partner, Jet Black, will be played by Mustafa Shakir (Marvel’s Luke Cage). Jet is a jazz enthusiast and one of the few honest cops in the solar system, which leads to a betrayal that has him now leading a vagabond life as a bounty hunter as captain of the Bebop.
Daniella Pineda will play Faye Valentine, the unpredictable one. She’s a brash bounty hunter suffering from amnesia after years of being cryogenically frozen. She can lie, steal, whatever she needs to do to survive.
Alex Hassell is on board as Vicious, the Red Dragon Syndicate’s most notorious hitman. He’s Spike’s ex-partner, arch-enemy, and he enjoys a good kill.
Cowboy Bebop is a new live action adaptation of the original anime directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno. The main story arc follows the rivalry between Spike and Vicious. It was produced in Japan in 1998, and originally, only twelve of the twenty-six episodes aired at first due to the adult-themed content of the show. The entire series was later broadcast in 1999, and was a critical and commercial success in both Japanese and American markets.
The Netflix show will run for ten episodes and is described as a “the jazz-inspired, genre-bending story of Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine and Radical Ed, a rag-tag crew of bounty hunters on the run from their pasts as they hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals. They’ll even save the world for the right price.”
Watanabe will serve as a consultant on the new series. Christopher Yost will write the first episode and executive produce along with Andre Nemec, Josh Applebaum, Jeff Pinker, and Scott Rosenberg of Midnight Radio. Yasuo Miyakawa, Masayuki Ozaki, and Shin Sasaki of Sunrise Inc.– the studio behind the original series–will also executive produce along with Marty Adelstein and Becky Clements of Tomorrow Studios, Tetsu Fujimura, and Matthew Weinberg. The series is a co-production between Netflix and Tomorrow Studios, with Netflix handling physical production.
