Hollywood and western TV productions are no strangers to whitewashing claims, from Scarlett Johansson's Ghost in the Shell to Marvel's Iron Fist.

But now Joel Kinnaman, who's set to star in new sci-fi Netflix series Altered Carbon, has dubbed accusations of whitewashing "a little bit lazy", after the Blade Runner-esque show sees an Asian character's consciousness placed into a white man's body.

Richard K Morgan's novel of the same title focusses on Takeshi Kovacs – a character of Japanese and Slovak descent – in a world where the rich and powerful can be stored digitally after their deaths and 'download' themselves into new bodies, or "sleeves".

The story starts in 2384, 250 years after the original Kovacs has been killed. The former soldier's consciousness is placed in a new body in order to solve the attempted murder of the richest man on earth.

Warner Bros.

Speaking to Radio Times, House of Cards and Suicide Squad star Kinnaman dismissed any worries about the backlash, saying: "No, not at all. I think that is a little bit lazy. You haven't dug into the whole story if that's how you interpret it.

"Whitewashing is a real thing that has been happening for a long time, and its quite disgraceful, in my opinion.

"But whitewashing is when you have an Asian character that gets played by a white person. Here, it's an Asian character that gets put into a white body and that is the story; that's how it is described in the book."

Netflix

The show also features two other versions of the same character, as played by Hawaii Five-0 star Will Yun Lee, who is of Korean descent, and Chinese-American actor Byron Mann, best known for The Big Short and Arrow.

Kinnaman went on to explain that the show purposefully weaves in scenes with Takeshi Kovacs' previous bodies in order to visually demonstrate his previous ethnicities, adding that the character "chooses a person that looks more like him when he was growing up: an Asian guy".

Last year Ed Skrein exited the upcoming Hellboy reboot after he faced criticism for taking on the role of Daimio. Meanwhile, Iron Fist starFinn Jones briefly quit social media following the furore around his casting.

We've compiled some of the major instances of Hollywood whitewashing from Matt Damon's The Great Wall to Jake Gyllenhaal in Prince of Persia.

Altered Carbon lands on Netflix on Friday, February 2.

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