He’s already played a rebooted RoboCop and will next be seen as Rick Flag in Suicide Squad, but now Joel Kinnaman — a Swede whose big US break was cop drama The Killing — is returning to the small screen. He’s set to star in Netflix’s series Altered Carbon, an adaptation of Richard Morgan’s gritty cyberpunk classic.
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The series will break the Philip K. Dick Award-winning tale into 10 episodes, the first of which will be helmed by Miguel Sapochnik, whose extensive TV resume includes the chilling “Hardhome”, a standout episode in Game of Thrones‘ fifth season, as well as the feature film Repo Men.
Here’s what Deadline says about the Altered Carbon series:
Based on Richard Morgan’s award-winning 2002 cyberpunk sci-fi novel, Altered Carbon is set in the 25th century when the human mind has been digitised and the soul itself is transferable from one body to the next. Takeshi Kovacs (Kinnaman), a former elite interstellar warrior known as an Envoy who has been imprisoned for 500 years, is downloaded into a future he’d tried to stop. If he can solve a single murder in a world where technology has made death nearly obsolete, he’ll get a chance at a new life on Earth.
Kinnaman seems a natural choice for the series; not only is he a rising star with a penchant for choosing genre works, he’s also already got a relationship with Netflix, thanks to his role on House of Cards.