John Cho has discussed the upcoming Cowboy Bebop series in an interview with IGN.
Cho is set to star as bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, a former hitman of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate and part of the original crew.
Originally released in 1998, Shinichirō Watanabe and Keiko Nobumoto’s 26-episode anime series is praised for its deep plot and stylistic animation. Set in the year 2071, the series follows the lives of a bounty hunter crew in their spaceship ‘Bebop’.
Reflecting the series, Cho said the live-action remake will keep all of the original’s oddities.
“It’s such a unique piece of material, it’s got such a unique vibe and so many disparate elements coming together into a single project, it’s so weird,” Cho said. “I think that was the biggest thing I was focusing on – we got to keep it strange.”
Sharing his personal favourite moments in the original anime, Cho listed a couple.
“Two of my favourite moments are the shower hermaphrodite scene and another one is when they’re going to find a betamax machine,” he said. “It’s so ballsy – it was eight minutes of looking for a betamax machine!”
At the end of last year, production of the series was shut down after Cho suffered an on-set injury.
In related news, Cho recently said that “diversity” encouraged him to take on a starring role in the 2020 remake of Japanese horror classic The Grudge.
