Joel Kinnaman

Joel Kinnaman
Charles Joel Nordström Kinnaman, known professionally as Joel Kinnaman, is a Swedish-American actor. He is best known for playing the lead role in the Swedish film Easy Money, a role that earned him a Guldbagge Award in the "Best Actor" category, and also for his roles as Frank Wagner in the Johan Falk film series and Governor Will Conway in the U.S. version of House of Cards. He starred on AMC's The Killing as detective Stephen Holder and played Alex...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth25 November 1979
CountrySweden
The Killing' has a really great combination of qualities: Even though it's very sad and deals with mourning and grief, it's still exciting. It's about real people and it doesn't shy from the painful points of life.
I went to high school in Texas for one year, my senior year. My parents wanted me to get out of Stockholm because I was running with the wrong crew. They wanted me to get back to my roots.
I think I've seen the first 'RoboCop' like 15 or 20 times. I'm like a kid that way.
It's great to get to work with your idols.
If you think back to the moments when you've gone through the most pain in your life, or the most severe anxiety, your body is very much involved in that. Your body is expressing those emotions. So, when we, as actors, try to access those feelings, the body is a great tool to use.
What I enjoy most with acting is when it's a good scene with one or two other actors, and you feel a strong connection and you don't know how you're going to respond, and everybody is listening to each other and getting affected by each other, and even though you've rehearsed it many times, it feels like it's happening right now.
As actors we're like these vagabond artists, we have to be invited to perform so if you don't have a choice of options its very hard to define yourself.
If we weren't doing remakes, nobody would know who Shakespeare was. I'm not saying that RoboCop is Shakespeare, but it's a way we're retelling. That's what we do as human beings. We retell our favorite stories.
I used to be like "Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?" But then, we do that all the time in the theater. Retelling stories is what we've done since we were sitting around campfires. It's a part of the human spirit. It doesn't have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite.
I'm never very good with marks. They're always like, 'You're not on your mark'. I was like, 'Oh, it's that thing you put on the ground? Yeah, I don't pay attention to it.'
I think you're always afraid when you go into like a big superhero movie that it's gonna be kinda just action and you're not gonna be able to just really go to the bottom of the characters.
I think I'm a boxer, but then when I get hurt, I'll start scrapping.
Everybody is trying to make something real, something with a core of substance, and of course, an exciting action movie with a lot of terrific stuff and fantastic visuals and everything, but at the core of it, it's a movie with substance and something that is going to make people think.
I love Starship Troopers. That's really smart. I think he really could portray fascism in a comedic way. It's funny because both José [Padilha] and [Paul] Verhoeven were accused of being fascists for their movies because they had fascist leads. So, it's not going to have his tone, but there's going to be political satire in it.