How showrunner Laeta Kalogridis created a new universe in Netflix's 'Altered Carbon'
— -- Netflix's new sci-fi epic "Altered Carbon" hits the streaming service today, but this isn't your typical dystopian series.
The show takes you to a world where consciousness can be stored and uploaded into new bodies, so that the wealthy and elite can try to live forever.
The cast and crew credit showrunner Laeta Kalogridis, known for her work in "Shutter Island," "Alexander" and more, for this fresh new project.
James Purefoy plays Laurens Bancroft, one of the influential elite who is using this new technology to live long past a normal lifespan. He said that when he got a call from Kalogridis and heard about her imagined world, he was intrigued.
"If you are going to create an authentic, new world, you need to have a budget and they had a budget ... The idea of playing somebody who was 350 years old, the wealthiest man in the known universe, with multiple clones of himself, that was enough material to get me signed on," he told reporters earlier this week during a Netflix-sponsored event.
"House of Cards" and "RoboCop" star Joel Kinnaman, who in his role as Takeshi Kovacs in the show is tasked with solving a murder, said there is no better home for this series than Netflix, under the guidance of Kalogridis.
"I just really understood this was going to be an up-and-coming show and I jumped right in," he said. "Because of Netflix's ambition, they could realize this world. But at the same time, the book is super gritty with violence and a lot of sex, so with Netflix, you could give it that complete realization."
Kinnaman added that having a female showrunner helped to ensure there were fully developed women characters.
"I think that a lot of the female roles were a bit underdeveloped in the book. At least what Laeta did was enhance a lot of the female roles and made them into three-dimensional characters."
One big change from the 2002 book is in the character of Reileen Kawahara, played by Dichen Lachman, who is Kovacs' sister in the series, with a more flushed-out role than in the original story.
"That just gives the third act of the story a completely different, emotional weight," Kinnaman said.
Will Yun Lee, who is also featured in the show, said he has never seen anything like the scenes he filmed with Lachman and others.
"I see them front and center, middle of the screen as women, who don't have a guy -- she's actually protecting me," he said. "They are front and center, slinging swords and fighting and doing big gun battle sequences as powerful women, and that kind of message moves the needle in a way for women ... wow, they've taken the hero position!"
Lee said Kalogridis was able to give the plot heart and humanity, while creating new, diverse roles for both men and women.
"It's kind of cool to see a black woman, Asian man have this epic love story," he teased about his role.
Lachman and her stars also spoke about the show as a satire of the current health care situation in America and around the world. In this imagined world, only the rich are able to jump from body to body and live longer lives.
"Science fiction is a wonderful place to explore a lot of things in our society today that we see as a problem or we think [are] beautiful," she said. "It's a way of getting people to think about it."
"Altered Carbon" is now streaming on Netflix.
