The newest star of Altered Carbon, Simone Missick, may be best known for playing Misty Knight in Marvel’s now-defunct Netflix Universe, but her latest role is going to turn (and decapitate) some heads. She’s shed the robotic arm for some neural implants and a gun, and she’s having the time of her life.
“The introduction to Trepp is her shooting a guy in the head! It’s like, this is the best character ever,” she told Gizmodo.
In an interview with Gizmodo at an Altered Carbon press junket, Missick talked about moving from Marvel’s Misty to Trepp, a cool but intense bounty hunter who finds herself coming after the Last Envoy known as Takeshi Kovacs (now played by Anthony Mackie).
When asked how she joined the project, Missick shared with a laugh about how she was “unemployed” (after Luke Cage was cancelled) and came across an audition opportunity for Altered Carbon. She said she immediately adored the character of Trepp, mainly for how she explored darker parts of her psyche that Misty was too good to reach.
“I fell in love with Trepp on the page. I thought that she was just everything that I wanted to explore. I had just gotten off of playing Misty Knight, who was a very strong female character within the MCU, and she had a certain level of fragility to her. But she mainly had a guiding principle of helping others that, you know, was very overwhelming to look at—me being a sceptic, looking at society the way that it is,” Missick said. “Trepp, I felt, explored all those darker things that I think and feel about the way that society is and the way that people are. I was just like, ‘Oh, I would really love to play this character.’”
Trepp might have been a bit more intense than Missick’s previous role—which makes sense for a cyberpunk series about the classism that results from digital immortality—but having that first part did help the other. Missick told us her experience playing the comic book hero wound up being the very thing that got her into the world of Altered Carbon.
“I get a call from one of the Netflix execs to say, ‘You know, we’re so sad that Luke Cage got cancelled. Hopefully, we’ll be working with you soon.’ And I said, ‘You know, I actually just put myself on tape for this Altered Carbon job, so hopefully I get that. And she’s like, ‘That’s my show.’ I said, ‘Oh, really?’ She said, ‘Yeah, it is. We’ll be seeing you soon,’” she said.
There’s a tendency for bounty hunter characters to be “lone wolf” types, but Trepp’s got a fun side—even though she’s hardened and quite brutal—and Missick gives the role a great deal of levity. Plus, she isn’t even a lone wolf. Trepp is a family woman. She has a wife and son who provide some much-needed balance to the more complicated parts of her story arc, like her search for her missing brother.
“She has a family that she is fighting to protect, and she’s got another family that she’s fighting to find. It’s a beautiful thing to see happen, and it not be treated in a way that I think we see it get treated in other stories,” Missick told Gizmodo. “If this were not a sci-fi genre, Trepp would be a mother that worked at a hospital and she’s trying to find her brother and she’s enlisted some man to help her, and she’ll do whatever she has to do. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with that story, but here you see it handled in a very different way, and I think it’s the beauty of Altered Carbon and the world they created.”
Missick also said her time playing Misty helped give her the emotional groundwork for playing a powerful female character in genre fiction, but also prepared her for the physical challenges on Altered Carbon, as both Misty and Trepp get into a hell of a lot of fights. Of course, Trepp has it a lot easier.
“It was so much easier because Trepp gets to kill people, and a gun beats a fist—unless you’re fighting Quellcrist Falconer [Renée Elise Goldsberry’s character]—99 per cent of the time,” she said. “It was much easier to be able to just whip something out as opposed to having to do hand-to-hand combat, and I loved every bit of it. I was like, this is so exciting. I get to kill people! I mean, this never happens.”
Altered Carbon season two debuts on Netflix February 27. Be on the lookout for more interviews from the cast in the coming days.