Netflix renews 'Altered Carbon' for a second season, Anthony Mackie to replace Joel Kinnaman
Netflix's 'Altered Carbon' has officially been renewed for a second season, but there will be a change-up in the actor playing the leading role of Takeshi Kovacs, the former Envoy with mercenary skills who now acts as a political operative. Joel Kinnaman played the role for season 1 and it has been announced that Anthony Mackie will be taking over the character for the upcoming season.
To those who follow the show, the casting change won't come as a surprise. Set in 2384 in a futuristic San Francisco known as Bay City, a person's memories can be decanted in a disk-shaped storage device called a 'cortical stack' that is implanted in the vertebrae at the back of the neck. Physical human and synthetic bodies are called 'sleeves' and when a person dies, his/her stack can be transferred to new bodies, theoretically implying that one can live forever. At the end of season 1, Kinnaman's Kovacs had to turn his sleeve, giving a perfect opportunity to introduce a new Kovacs for season 2.
