Altered Carbon’s Lela Loren and Torben Liebrecht on Twisted Villains

Altered Carbon Season 2’s new batch of episodes comes with new faces for the same heroes but all around new cast and characters for its antagonists. This is where Lela Loren and Torben Liebrecht come into the picture. Throught the Netflix show’s second season, Loren and Liebrecht portray Governor Danica Harlen and Colonel Ivan Carrera, a menacing duo whose relationship in itself has its ups and downs. Without talking too heavily about the many spoilers packed into Altered Carbon‘s eight new episodes, the cast members opened up bringing the intensity to their respective characters in an interview with Comicbook.com.

Both characters are menacing in their own ways. Loren’s Harlan comes in as a manipulative mastermind while Liebrecht’s Carrera gets his hands dirty (or bloody) a bit more often. Unlike many of their co-stars, these two actors have the privilege of creating a character which is wholly their own as they were not portrayed by others wearing separate “sleeves” in episodes before their debut.

“I really try to find the raw materials of somebody,” Loren explained. “With Danica, she’s got all of these really human desires. She wants to save, she wants autonomy from the Protectorate. She wants peace and order. She wants to stop these murders, but it’s how she goes about getting that is what sort of creates the horror.” No good villain thinks they’re a villain, do they? “She uses these tactics at the expense of honesty, at the expense of transparency, at the expense, ultimately, of compassion and love, and so that’s sort of how, I don’t use an external [inspiration] because, otherwise, you only see the outside,” she explained. “I really like to get into the internal workings of a clock to figure out how it’s built, and so it’s sort of like Danica doesn’t have a strategy that holds both. She just goes at one at the expense of these other human ideals, so it’s like, you go for a good thing at the expense of these other good things, and then horror ensues.”

Watch the full interviews with the cast of Altered Carbon in the video below!

Liebrecht jokes that the most intense day on set was bringing cupcakes for everyone and watching others eat them while his physique called for not touching such sugary goodness. More seriously, “there were things that were physically demanding, but there were also other things where you don’t see that much on the physical level,” he explained. “It’s on a psychological level, especially in the scenes that I had with Lela, because they kind of become very pokey with each other over the course of the show.”

“Dania likes to heckle him,” Loren added.

“It’s really nice because on the one hand, he’s a soldier’s soldier,” Liebrecht explained. “He has a military task that he has to fulfill on the planet, so he has to stick to a certain sort of protocol, but that protocol is constantly undermined by [Danica]…She’s a bit of a spoiled brat, that character! No, but those are the moments that are really, really interesting as an actor, because you have to be composed on the outside, but there’s so much boiling underneath, and you don’t wanna break the fourth wall, and, go, like, to the audience, but you want to show the human factor.”

Liebrecht and Loren’s impressive and often twisted performances in Altered Carbon‘s second season are available on Netflix now. Are you enjoying the next episodes? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram and Twitter!