Joel Kinnaman Disappointed By Altered Carbon Cancellation

Last month Netflix cancelled a fan-favorite series, as Netflix is want to do. This time the high-concept sci-fi series Altered Carbon got the axe, with the streamer opting to not bring back the series for a third season. The crux of the series dealt with a futuristic version of body swapping as actor Joel Kinnaman played the role of “Takeshi Kovacs” in the first season with Anthony Mackie taking on the part in the second. Despite no longer being part of the show in its sophomore season, Kinnaman was disappointed to hear about the premature ending of the show, revealing his frustration in a new interview.

“Yeah, I would’ve loved to see it carry on,” Kinnaman told The Hollywood Reporter. “I felt the concept of having a new actor play the main character every season was a really unique thing, so I would’ve loved to see that. If the show would’ve done better, then more people would’ve loved the upcoming seasons, and more people would’ve come back to the first season. You always want people to see your work, right? So that was a little disappointing, but I was so disconnected from that. I’d done so many things in between, so I didn’t really have that strong of an emotional connection to it anymore. But I was sad to see that they didn’t find a reason to continue.”

As Kinnaman seemingly alludes to here, the cancellation by Netflix appears to stem from a lack of viewership that an expensive sci-fi series like this would require. According to the initial report about its cancellation, Netflix made this decision in April and was not influenced by the coronavirus pandemic, which did influence the company’s decision to cancel two other shows.

Laeta Kalogridis created Altered Carbon as an adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name from 2002. In the series, society is transformed by new technology that allows for consciousness to be digitized, making human bodies interchangeable and death impermanent. The second season took place 30 years after the first.

Production on the first season of Altered Carbon, featuring Kinnaman in the lead, took place from 2016 to 2017, with the second season not airing on Netflix until the first part of 2020. In the time since he was involved, the actor shot entire other shows like Amazon’s Hanna and Apple TV+’s For All Mankind. He even returned to the World of DC as Rick Flag for James Gunn’s upcoming movie The Suicide Squad.