Just a few days after Netflix released a cool trailer for season two of Marvel’s Luke Cage, Deadline is reporting that Annabella Sciorra has now joined the cast. The story says she’ll be playing Rosalie Carbone, a “dangerous downtown criminal underworld power player” who is looking to expand her evil empire into Harlem. Luke Cage will presumably have a probably with that, since he already spends most of time keeping criminal jerks out of Harlem, especially with two of last season’s villains—Alfre Woodard’s Mariah Dillard and Theo Rossi’s Shades—still hanging around.
In the comics, Carbone had a brief relationship with a man who later turned out to be The Punisher, inspiring her to try and hunt him down and kill him, but Luke Cage will probably abandon the Punisher connection just to streamline things. That may be disappointing to fans of big crossovers, but it’s not like the MCU and Netflix’s Marvel shows haven’t introduced characters from the comics with no resemblance to their original incarnations before.
Marvel’s Luke Cage returns to Netflix on June 22.