John Cho’s lead role in Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop gives Asian actors hope for the future

The use of capital letters and exclamation points surged in certain corners of the internet on Thursday after Netflix announced the cast of its upcoming series Cowboy Bebop.

“JOHN CHO,” several tweets yelled. Another: “john! cho! as! spike! spiegel!”

Spike Spiegel is the “impossibly cool” bounty hunter at the centre of Cowboy Bebop, a live-action adaptation of the popular space Western anime that premiered in Japan during the late ’90s and first aired in the United States during the early 2000s. The show will follow Spike, his ex-police officer partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and amnesiac con artist Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) as they zoom through the solar system to chase down criminals for their bounties.

Much of the excitement stems from the fact that Cho, a Korean American actor known for his roles in the Harold & Kumar movies, Star Trek and Searching , is of Asian descent. Though the original Cowboy Bebop series was heavily inspired by Americana, it is widely held that the Japanese actor Yasaku Matsuda served as inspiration for Spike. Netflix’s casting call reportedly described its ideal lead as an “Asian (or partially Asian) man in his mid-20s to mid-30s.” Cho is 46.

Cho’s casting is a step forward for Netflix, which has stumbled in the past when it comes to live-action adaptations of Asian source material. The streaming giant faced accusations of whitewashing when the white actor Nat Wolff was cast as teen serial killer Light in 2017’s Death Note, which was originally a manga series written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. Light is still pursued by the quirky private detective L (Lakeith Stanfield, who is black), as he was in the manga, but the story is transported from Japan to the United States.