Joel Kinnaman

#4,190
Joel on a possible return for season 2 of Altered Carbon and all the things he's learned from Will Smith (if you couldn't already tell).
Takeshi Kovacs has moved onto a new sleeve. Joel Kinnaman has moved onto Hanna. But has Altered Carbon moved on from Kinnaman? Not necessarily, according to the actor.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter in the aftermath of news that he won't return for a second season of the Netflix sci-fi drama, Kinnaman isn't ready to officially say goodbye to the franchise. "I can't confirm that. We don't know anything about the second season," he says when asked about his forthcoming exit from the series.

To be clear, sources told THR that Kinnaman signed a one-year deal to star in Altered Carbon, which technically has yet to be officially renewed for a second season at the streaming giant. (Reviews were largely favorable, and the show managed to break through a cluttered landscape that's rapidly approaching 500 scripted originals.) The actor has already signed on to star in an ongoing series (Hanna) for Netflix rival Amazon, which would also likely rule out Kinnaman returning to Altered Carbon as a series regular in a likely second season.

The first season of Altered Carbon, an adaptation of the Richard K. Morgan novel of the same name, from creator and showrunner Laeta Kalogridis, ends with protagonist Takeshi Kovacs leaving his life in Bay City behind for new adventures. As he leaves, he walks off in a new sleeve (or body), strongly indicating that Kinnaman's work in the series is at an end. In the sequel novel to Altered Carbon, called Broken Angels, the action picks up decades into the future, far away from Earth, as Kovacs embarks on a new mission with a brand new sleeve. Should the series follow suit in season two, which remains unconfirmed by Netflix at this point, all signs point toward the resolution of Kinnaman's work in Altered Carbon — especially since Kinnaman only signed a one-year deal to star.

For his part, Kinnaman acknowledges that he approached Kovacs with the understanding that his time as the character wouldn't last beyond a single season, but offers an asterisk: "I don't know what's going to happen. No one does, really. Season two hasn't been picked up yet, so who knows?"

"If it was a cool story, for sure," he added when asked if he would want to continue on as Takeshi Kovacs. "I loved making this show. I had a great experience. The feedback has been fantastic. But I have no idea what's going on with the second season."

Over the course of the show's first and currently only 10 episodes, Kovacs undergoes an intense amount of physical and emotional trauma. He suffers relentless abuse in combat, brutally beaten in a fighting arena while succumbing to poison at one point. He's ruthlessly interrogated in a virtual realm, with methods so severe that his legs are sawed off and his body is burned alive, just as two examples. The final act of the season centers on Kovacs identifying the person responsible for the crimes he's been investigating: none other than his own sister Reileen (Dichen Lachman), long thought dead, now revealed as a centuries-old psychopath. It's little wonder why Kovacs walks away from his Kinnaman-fueled sleeve by the end of the season; one wonders why he would return to it.

If nothing else, a second season of Altered Carbon for Kinnaman would have to wait until he's finished with his current assignment: filming Amazon's TV adaptation of Hanna, the 2011 action movie from director Joe Wright, starring Saoirse Ronan. Kinnaman will star in the series as Erik, a mercenary who raises his genetically engineered daughter (Esme Creed-Miles) in the wilderness in order to keep her safe. The series marks a reunion between Kinnaman and Mireille Enos, his co-star on the AMC-turned-Netflix drama The Killing.

Below, Kinnaman speaks with THR about his work on Altered Carbon, how his collaboration with Will Smith on Suicide Squad informed his work on the set of the Netflix series, the lasting life lessons he gleaned from playing Takeshi Kovacs, his hopes for Hanna and more.
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#4,191
The interview.
In approaching the complicated world of Altered Carbon, what was your entry point into the show's universe and the character of Kovacs, specifically?

There's a lot of sci-fi stuff to wrap your head around, but when you're preparing for the character, you have to strip all of that away. You have to peel the layers of the onion until you get down to the real heart of the character. It's a person that is constantly dealing with loss and has made himself numb to that feeling, and therefore doesn't care about anyone. He won't allow himself to feel things for other people. Throughout his whole life, everyone who has ever mattered to him has been taken away from him. That's the problem for Kovacs, in this period of his life. He's confronted with a situation where he once again has nobody in his life who matters. Everyone he loves is dead. All of the sudden, these new people he's using for his own gain start meaning something to him. That's something he wants to avoid at all costs. I tried to dig down into that.

There's not so much you can do with him being an Envoy and part of the rebellion. It was more about boiling down to his human qualities. He's a man who was never allowed to be a boy. To me, that means he'll always be a boy in some way. He's someone who has raised himself. He's done a lot of things that are very awful. It's someone who carries a lot of self-loathing. To me, when I play a person who is often sarcastic and doesn't want to engage in the world, and doesn't want to show any emotion, or doesn't want to show people that he feels anything… to me, those are markers that this is a person who has actually been really hurt, and is trying to keep those emotions away.

Was your approach to playing Kovacs markedly different from how you would normally approach a character, since you're playing just the latest in a long line of bodies for Takeshi Kovacs? How did you tackle the physicality?

It was a tricky thing. Usually the way I work is I often work on the physical body language, the tension. That's usually where my imagination takes me when I start building a character. I start by thinking, is this a confident person? Where in the body is the tension of this person? If the tension is in the shoulders, does it make the head come forward? Maybe he looks at other people like this, a little bit hunched over from the side, so he's actually a little shy, but he's also aggressive. All of that, the physical life, starts to feed into the emotional life. Here, there's so many layers to that, that it was almost hard to decipher. You're someone with a physical inclination about how you normally feel in a body, and then all of the sudden you're put into another body. That body has physical memories that are affecting you. It suddenly becomes very freeing. You're freed up to do pretty much whatever you want. I saw him as a person who carried a lot of sadness, but was also very physically able. I made him a little hunched over, but at the same time, strong. I looked at a lot of big cats.

Good call. Kovacs is definitely a cat person more than a dog person.

For sure. (Laughs.) I was looking at a lot of lions and tigers. They're very relaxed. If you look at them, they almost look a little sad. Almost like they don't care about anything. It's very powerful. When something happens and they need to be active, they react very quickly and can be very dangerous. That's how I was looking at it.

Did you collaborate with Will Yun Lee on creating Kovacs, since he's playing his original sleeve?

Will came in right at the tail end [of production]. He was prepping to get ready to shoot right as I was wrapping up. They showed him footage of what we had shot. He asked if there were any physical mannerisms I was doing that he could pick up on. We found a couple of things that he could do, so we could create a common thread. He did an amazing job. A really great performance.

You trained hard for the action scenes, learning martial arts, for instance. How much has that training stuck with you since walking away from the role?

It was one of the big gifts that came with this project and this job: digging into the action part of it, and the martial arts. It's become a big part of my life now. It became part of something I was already doing, in a sense. I've realized I'm always happiest in life when I'm working on a role, because then your whole life is seen through this filter, through the curiosity of a new role, and trying to get as much information about a role as you can — always learning new things. When I didn't have a role to work on, when I was in between jobs, I would feel like I had much less purpose. I would feel a little empty in a way. Now, after finding martial arts… it's something I had found even before that, really, that I should always be learning something new. Different hobbies. The process makes me feel good. Now, martial arts has just been the perfect thing. I've been training a lot since I shot Altered Carbon. It's remained a part of my life since then.

Which action scene was the most physically demanding?

Probably the one in episode six, at Fight Drome. It was really tough to shoot. The physical conditions… we were shooting in a big garage with 250 extras and really bad air. The ground was sand, so it was so dusty. The air quality was so bad. At the same time, it was super physically demanding. I also had to play injured in a way where I was getting paralyzed while I was fighting. There was a lot of tension in it. It was a big, long fight sequence with a lot of intricate moves. We shot it over the course of four or five days. One of our stunt guys tore ligaments in both of his knees. We needed another guy to play him. It was a really tough shoot. Purely physically, I think that was the toughest one.

What was the last scene you filmed for the series?

The last scene… (Pauses.) It was Head in the Clouds. We were filming the Head in the Clouds crashing into the ocean.

What do you remember about the day, as you were wrapping your work on Altered Carbon?

It was a special day. It was a really special day. One of the big challenges for me in this job… when I worked on Suicide Squad, I became friends with Will Smith, and I was so deeply impressed with the amount of energy he puts into creating a good environment for everyone on set, and how much his energy was based on generosity and giving people a good experience. It was something that I really respected. I love myself the most when I'm in that mind space, when I'm generous. It was so great to see someone on that level using their power to do good in that way. My relationship with Will really reinforced some of those ambitions that I had when it came to being a good leader and being a force for good in your community and work environment. With Altered Carbon, it was my first real lead role after [Suicide Squad], and I looked at it as an opportunity to really try that. Not in the way Will does it, because he's been doing it for twenty years; he's a very old man now. (Laughs.) But he's been doing it for a long time.

Before I went up to Vancouver to shoot, I went to see Will, and we sat down and had a conversation over maybe three or four hours about leadership. That was a big ambition that I had with this project. I put a lot of effort into it. I don't want to come off as bragging, but it was something I was really proud of. After we wrapped, I've never gotten this kind of response before from a crew. Several crew members told me I had contributed to making it a happy period of their life. To me, it really reinforced the idea that when you see someone do good like Will does, it inspired me to do good. I saw what he did on Suicide Squad, and you would see crew members who were happy to come to work. Of course they were tired, but they would be happy when they went home. Their kids would have a parent who would come home happy from work. It's all about sending those positive ripples out into the world. That's what I'm most proud of with Altered Carbon.

You're moving from Altered Carbon into Hanna for Amazon. What can you say about the project, which reunites you with Enos?

I loved the movie. My favorite part was the relationship between the father and daughter. The series version has an even greater focus on that. Just that idea of parenthood, and how there are so many layers… I'm so compelled by a person who takes their child, and to save it, he goes out into the woods and raises it in solitude for 14 years. To both be surviving in the woods with a child, and also raising that child in the wilderness — what that does to your mind and your connection to your child and your connection to the world — I think it's really fascinating. Add in the fact that she's a genetic experiment with incredible abilities? It's such an incredible idea. It's a family drama wrapped into this very high concept idea, while it's also a coming-of-age and coming-into-the-world story. I can't wait to dive in. And then getting to play with Mireille again? That was a huge factor for me. I'm so excited about that. She's one of my favorite people in the world, and she's also one of my favorite actors in the world to watch and to play with. I'm so excited. I can't wait.
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#4,195
A very long article from the Rolling Stone.
In the first episode of Altered Carbon, Netflix's bid for a big, dystopic sci-fi-blockbuster series, Takeshi Kovacs, played by Swedish-American actor Joel Kinnaman, drops to the floor, his naked body oozing out of body bag full of gelatinous preservatives that have kept this new corpus intact. With a fit of gag-inducing gurgles and coughs, he pulls from his throat an endoscopic feeding tube. Disorientation and paranoia soon set in and he lunges after his lab-coat wearing overlords in search of a fragment of mirror to see his face, and someone to explain to him when it is, why he's here, and what, exactly, happens to him now. It turns out, Kovacs' consciousness has been "imprisoned" for the past 250 years, yet he still possesses superhuman fighting abilities.

In the year 2384, bodies are skins, or "sleeves," that are mere vessels for cortical "stacks" that contain the self in a kind of stone-shaped glowing hard drive that looks as if you could skip it across a lake with a perfect throw. The problem of death has been solved, as long as you can continue to find new sleeves (a.k.a., bodies) to animate the stack that makes you, you. In other words, the human body has basically become a protective OtterBox for your iPhone's SIM card, but way more expensive. Damage the stack implanted at the base of your cortex and you're toast, sleeve or no sleeve. Call it an Achilles' neck, if you will, but even when death is solved, drama still demands its possibility, or why keep watching?

What ties all of this neon wilderness to the present day is the idea that if or when we can achieve a kind of immortality, only a tiny population of the world's most wealthy individuals will be able to afford it. This, as it turns out, is what drew Kinnaman to the show.

"That was the part of the story that really spoke to me," Kinnaman says. "We see the extreme exaggeration of that trend of [income inequality] that we're already seeing now, so devastatingly, with 80 percent of the world living in poverty. This generation of Americans is the first one projected to live shorter lives than their parents. At the same time, the wealthiest among us are projected to live longer than any humans have ever lived before. We're already seeing these advances in technology and healthcare that have the potential to do so much good, but they're only doing good for the richest segment. In some respect, you can almost say that rich people have become a different species."

Kinnaman is wealthy at this point in his career, but it doesn't define him. His father and mother were not much interested in the creature comforts of a secure job and sound every bit the global vagabonds their own son has become. When his father fled the Vietnam War for Sweden and met his future wife, Kinnaman's mother, their family didn't have much. Kinnaman has four sisters and a half-brother.

When it's suggested he wasn't born with that elusive silver spoon dangling from his infant hand, Kinnaman laughs. "Why would you say that? You don't think I talk sophisticated?" But he agrees, explaining that his parents never focused on a career. "They weren't careerists in any way," he explains. "I don't think they were really interested in material wealth. Their focus was always the family. We got by. There was never anything really lacking, but there was never anything extra. There was food on the table, but if I wanted some new clothes, I had to make my own money to get them."

He describes his education at an English school in Stockholm as a weird time, where he would move in and out of different circles of friends, get into a trouble, not quite fit in anywhere, and brood. His father suggested a year abroad, just to get away, regroup, and see some of the world

"I did have a really strange year. I was getting into a lot of trouble back home in Stockholm. My whole group of friends, when I tried to leave them, they turned on me. Then, all of my new friends, as soon as they ran into any of my old friends, then my old friends would beat up my new friends and rob them. They would leave me unscathed, just to really rub it in. Then, no one wanted to be my friend. It was a very lonely time.

"It was a period of a lot of anxiety and I developed this weird eating disorder," Kinnaman continues. "I was not feeling very good. So, we came up with this idea that I could go be an exchange student for a year."

As with nearly everything Kinnaman describes, he appears equally as interested and grateful for the awfulness of something as he does his own personal triumphs. He'd hoped to be placed somewhere in California, with Oregon a close second. Instead, he got Hell Valley, Texas, a suburb of Austin. (Later, he found out it was actually called Del Valle, but "hell" is all about perspective, so what's in a name?)

"They picked me up from the airport," he recalls, referring to his Texas host family. "They were both under five-foot; they were really short people. They just did not talk. I mean, she talked the s**t out of me while I was in the car. He didn't say a word for the entire hour from the airport. It was really stressing me out when we got to the house. When they put the key in the door, it was like a zoo inside."

Kinnaman begins howling to impart just how many animals were contained inside this prefab home, that once inside, revealed slippery floors covered in desert sand, a bedroom with blank walls and a mattress, and about a dozen long-haired sausage dogs – the source of the beastly bedlam he heard while outside the door.

"I felt like Indiana Jones when he was lowered into the snake pit," he says, laughing. "And this was my big adventure to get away from all the trouble? I remember when the airplane was coming in to land, I was looking at all the houses and there were so many swimming pools. Coming from Sweden, having a swimming pool was super exotic. I was like, 'Oh, god, I hope they have a swimming pool.' They were so far away from having a swimming pool, you have no idea. They were just really odd people. She was like, [putting on his best Texas accent] 'If you wanna watch a movie, just go look in that cupboard and you can watch any movie you want.' They had about 150 films in there. They were all cartoons."

At school, with kids his own age, things picked up. He loved going, even when 40 percent of the students were allegedly gang-affiliated. It's when he caught the attention of the high school football coach, with his performance at a soccer practice, that his entrée into Texas life came to full flower.

"I played a lot of sports in Sweden, so I soon became the captain of the soccer team," he says. "While we were doing drills, I was kicking the ball pretty deep. The football team was playing on the field next to ours. The football coach came over and was like, 'Hey, you! Are you that Swedish guy? You think you could kick a real football?' They just shut down the soccer practice and I walked over to the football field and I started kicking the football and they kept moving the ball back and they were like, 'Well, you just broke the school record. So, you wanna be a kicker?' Then, I was the kicker on the football team. I was OK. I kicked a some 45-yard field goals, but I also missed a couple."
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#4,196
Part 2
After his year abroad, Kinnaman returned to Stockholm. According to his former classmate and actress Noomi Rapace, she never saw the adolescent awkwardness that would put Kinnaman in a less than flattering light. His rough side appealed to her. By her own admission, she was an "uneducated, punk rock girl from the countryside, and a good drinker" who became fascinated by this kid who was "skinny, tall, and totally hip-hop."

"I was like, 'Damn, he looks cool,'" Rapace says, laughing, calling from a film set in Europe, knowing it's for a piece not about her, but Kinnaman, which speaks volumes about his likeability and strong friendships. "He was part of the cool kids. I was part of this lonely planet and everyone probably thought I was really bad ass and really tough and hardcore, but I was actually nervous and wanted to be a part of that group. Normally, the talented people are not cool in high school. But Joel was cool and talented.

"We officially met later on," Rapace continues. "He went to a theater school in Malmö down in the south [of Sweden]. I knew a lot of people around him, and I started to hear rumors about him doing an amazing show, a play he was in – I think he was Dostoevsky. And I heard rumors about his amazing performance and I was like, 'What? The hip-hop kid? He's a serious actor now?' I became amazed more and more by him and his journey. Normally, I just want to be alone, but I Iove being around him and Cleo [Wattenström, tattoo artist and Kinnaman's wife since 2016). They've been like family to me when I'm working in L.A. I'm so happy to have him in my life. He's like my brother."

Kinnaman went on to great success as an actor in Sweden, but his restlessness, possibly inherited from his father, or his peripatetic childhood, left him wanting more. Instead of staying put, Kinnaman soon decided he should give America another go, not to revisit the pack of Texas dachshunds, but to expand the range of his work.

"The way my career was going in Sweden, I got about as far as I could go," he says, about his decision to abandon his growing stardom in Stockholm. "There was sort of a glass ceiling in Sweden and I could have kept doing it, but I felt I had reached the pinnacle. I think the natural aspiration – well, maybe not natural – is to surpass that. When I moved to the States, eight or nine years ago, there were no Swedes here. Since my dad was American, I had this feeling I could go and do it for real."

Although the Skarsgård clan has been cast in film and TV roles for years, Kinnaman felt free of expectations. "There were Swedes that came to Hollywood, but they would play like German prison guards. They would have dialogue like, 'You, there. Go to the left.' That was their contribution. I thought I could play American characters and have a real career. Then, when I tried, it all went pretty quickly and I was encouraged to keep going."

Most viewers were likely introduced to his work Stateside in The Killing, the AMC detective procedural that benefitted greatly from the chemistry between its costars, Kinnaman and Mireille Enos. He followed that by giving it his best in the RoboCop reboot – another project that focused on reassembled bodies with A-list potential – and his biggest project to date, as military officer Rick Flag in Suicide Squad (he'll also be in the sequel slated for a 2019 release). Then he returned to TV when he starred in House of Card's fourth and fifth seasons as Will Conway – the sexy, young political rival pitted against Kevin Spacey's sinister Frank Underwood.

The partnership that made The Killing so appealing will hopefully reemerge when Kinnaman and Enos reunite for Amazon's forthcoming series adaptation of Joe Wright's 2011 film, Hanna.

"To work with Joel Kinnaman is to have an ally," Enos explains via email. "He's someone who allows you to live in his pocket and is happy to live in yours too. He knows how to be a partner. If there were ever disagreements on set, he always took my side knowing we could figure out the details later. It's a trait that builds total trust. He manages to give performances that are totally compelling, charming, and lovable, while also being without vanity or ego."

For Laeta Kalogridis, Altered Carbon's creator and showrunner, it was Kinnaman's emanation of worldliness that appealed to her most, considering his character on the show is, according to his cortical stack, an Asian revolutionary merely housed inside the body of an extremely fit Swede. "I ate kale leaves with my own tears as dressing," Kinnaman quips about his physical preparation for the role.

"I didn't have a fixed idea in my head of who the actor should be," Kalogridis says. "I really felt like we needed someone who had a feeling of being a little bit outside of any culture he's in, and Joel has this. I think it's because of the Swedish thing: He's multilingual; he has such an affinity for world cultures; and he doesn't exist in a small, very defined cultural space. He's a citizen of the world, and you feel it. You feel it as an actor, you feel it in his performance, you feel it in your interactions with him as a person. And he was such a joy to work with. A true team player."

As for Kinnaman, he's going to keep himself on this side of the Atlantic for the foreseeable future. Recently married to tattoo artist Cleo Wattenström and living in Venice, California, the overcast Nordic winters are becoming a distant memory. But as rumors of a second season of Altered Carbon have inevitably begun (and whether he'll be returning), Kinnaman might be ready to look elsewhere, per usual.

"I love science fiction. I gravitate toward those kinds of stories when I'm looking for my next thing to watch. I think I have done enough science fiction for a while now. I think might go play someone with a terminal disease, or something," he says, laughing. "I have way too little body fat and too many abs in this show. Now I've got to go do something to get my credibility back."
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