John Cho opens up about Cowboy Bebop's abrupt cancellation at Netflix: 'It's stunning to me'

John Cho recently got candid about Netflix canceling its live-action Cowboy Bebop series after a single season back in December. Recently speaking with The Hollywood Reporter about his time spent making the show, Cho (who played bounty hunter Spike Spiegel) admitted that the news "was very shocking and I was bummed." When the announcement first started to make headlines, Cho seemingly addressed the crushing development on Twitter with a .gif of Tom Selleck saying: "I'm okay."

"I put a lot of my life into it. I’d gotten injured shooting that show and so I took a year off because of the surgery and devoted myself to rehab, came back and finished the show," he continued during his conversation with THR. "It was this huge mountain for me to climb healing from that injury. I felt good about myself as a result. We also shot the show in New Zealand, so my family moved there. It was just a huge event in my life and it was suddenly over."

Based on the fan favorite anime from the 1990s, Cowboy Bebop centers around a motley crew of bounty hunters who traverse the galaxy, getting into all sorts of hijinks, in their titular spaceship: the Bebop. Mustafa Shakir and Danielle Pineda played Spike's fellow crew members, Jet Black and Faye Valentine, respectively. Geoff Stults (Chalmers), Tamara Tunie (Ana), Mason Alexander Park (Gren), Rachel House (Mao), Ann Truong & Hao Xuande (Shin and Lin), and Elena Satine (Julia) rounded out the rest of the ensemble.

Despite the obvious disappointment that comes with learning you've been unceremoniously canceled after one outing, Cho was "very warmed by the response" to the new series. "I wish I could have contacted everybody and gotten hugs," he continued. "You can’t do that now, but … I don’t know what this is. I’m mystified a little bit about how you can connect with people that you don’t know doing your work, but I won’t question it. I will value it and treasure it. I’m just really deeply appreciative that anyone would care. It’s stunning to me."

Ahead of the show's streaming premiere, showrunner Andre Nemec teased "big plans" for future seasons. When it became clear that there would be no more installments, Nemec took to social media and lamented the fact that viewers would not see any of the "cool sh**' the writers had planned for Season 2.

All 10 episodes of the live-action Cowboy Bebop are currently streaming on Netflix along with the 26 episodes of the original anime.

Netflix is currently in the midst of adapting another beloved piece of Japanese culture for the world of live-action with a flesh-and-blood interoperation of the epic pirate manga: One Piece. The project announced its main cast about a month before Bebop got the axe.