Netflix’s hit show Altered Carbon has added a number of new cast members for its second season. This star-spangled cast includes Dina Shihabi as Dig 301/Annabel Lee, a rejuvenated AI.
Shihabi first rose to the public eye in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. In the Amazon series, she brought humanity to her role as Hanin Ali, the wife of a terrorist. According to her interview with Brief Take, John Krasinski told her, “we knew you were the first the first second we saw your tape.”
Since her success alongside Krasinski and Ali Suliman in Jack Ryan, Shihabi has moved on to science fiction. While working on her latest role in Altered Carbon, she has also begun writing her own show.
Dina Shihabi Breaks into the Spotlight in Jack Ryan
30-year-old Shihabi has performed as a theater, film, and television actress since her teen years. Her career has taken off with her role as Hanin Ali in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, for which she received a Critics’ Choice Award nomination.
This first major television role represented a chance for Shihabi to play a complicated, real Arab woman – as opposed to a mere victim or terrorist.
“What our show does so well is that it takes people who are in those circumstances, but we get to look behind the curtain and see who they really are,” Shihabi explains. “As an Arab, it makes me so proud that I get to portray and show this complex, three dimensional, real human being that could be from anywhere.”
Shihabi hopes that more roles for Saudi and Arab actors and characters will open up if real people share their stories. “Tell the complicated, weird, hurtful, hopeful magical story that has happened to you or that you dream about,” advises Shihabi. “We want it all.”
The writer and actress hopes to bring these stories to life, working to develop a new show called Habibti, based of the life of Shihabi and her Saudi friends living in LA.
From Dance to Music
Before becoming a full-time actress in 2010, Shihabi also danced professionally. “My first love was dance,” she says.
In fact, her dance teacher in Dubai inspired her to pursue her creative passions. “In a culture that hasn’t yet embraced expression and creativity, she completely encouraged it with this fierce free spirit of hers,” recalls Shihabi. “She’s totally the reason I’m here.”
Shihabi eventually became the first Saudi woman to be accepted to both the Julliard School and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Although dance was her first passion, Shihabi could not resist the pull of acting. “It just feels like this is what I was supposed to do,” she says. She grew up watching movies like The Sound of Music and Jurassic Park. “I was very obsessed with how it all worked, and I watched these movies over and over,” she remembers.
Her acting career has included her recurring role on Jack Ryan, an appearance on Ramy Youssef’s Ramy as Nour, and now a recurring role on the hit show Altered Carbon.
Dina Shihabi Brings Humanity to Artificial Intelligence
Fol, Shihabi has taken the role of an AI, Dig 301 aka Annabel Lee, on the second season of Netflix’s Altered Carbon. The character is an out-of-work AI designed to help archaeologists. She becomes “Annabel Lee” after meeting another AI called Poe, modelled after Edgar Allan Poe himself. The name Annabel Lee is a nod to one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous poems “Annabel Lee,” written two years after the death of his wife in which he speaks to the transcendence of love.
Altered Carbon takes place in a distant future, in which humans have the ability to move their consciousness, like a hard drive, from one body to another. With body-swapping and highly advanced AIs, the show has room for a large cast of characters, including Shihabi, Anthony Mackie, and Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry.
Watch both seasons of Altered Carbon here with a Netflix subscription.
