'Altered Carbon' Season 2 Cast Announcement Video Shows Off Some New Sleeves

Altered Carbon is coming back for an all-new body-swapping season. There's no footage of the Netflix show's new episodes yet, but there is a new cast announcement video, full of some new faces, and some familiar ones as well. Watch the Altered Carbon season 2 cast announcement video below, and try not to blow your stack.

Say hello to the cast of Altered Carbon season 2. There's Anthony Mackie as Takeshi Kovacs, Simone Missick as Trepp, Dina Shihabi as Dig 301, Torbin Liebrecht as Colonel Ivan Carerra, James Saito as Tanaseda Hideki, Renee Elise Goldsberry as Quellcrist Falconer and Chris Conner as Poe. Anyone who saw Altered Carbon season 1 will immediately notice that the actor playing Kovacs has changed. Joel Kinnaman played the character the first time around (with Will Yun Lee playing the original Kovacs in flashbacks), but now MCU mainstay Anthony Mackie has taken over.

This is no case of stunt-casting. The world of Altered Carbon allows characters to swap bodies at will. People's consciousness are called stacks, and they're housed on little discs. Those stacks can then be placed in new sleeves – aka, bodies. If you get injured, or sick, or just plain old, you can simply find a new body to slip into – provided you have the money.

Here's the synopsis for the first season:

Based on the classic cyberpunk noir novel by Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon is an intriguing story of murder, love, sex, and betrayal, set more than 300 years in the future. Society has been transformed by new technology: consciousness can be digitized; human bodies are interchangeable; death is no longer permanent. Takeshi Kovacs is the lone surviving soldier in a group of elite interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order. His mind was imprisoned – on ice – for centuries until Laurens Bancroft, an impossibly wealthy, long-lived man, offers Kovacs the chance to live again. In exchange, Kovacs has to solve a murder ... that of Bancroft himself.

I watched Altered Carbon season 1, and enjoyed some of it. It had a lot of style – although that style was lifted straight out of Blade Runner. Like most Netflix shows, though, pacing was a major issue. Hopefully season 2 will fix that. As for what season 2 will be about, well, that's still a mystery. The show is adapted from the book series by Richard K. Morgan, so creator/executive producer/showrunner Laeta Kalogridis will likely be drawing on the source material for inspiration. Those books span hundreds of years, so it's possible season 2 could jump forward in time.

Season 2 is now in production.