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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 U.S. 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.




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 digitized 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.