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
I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.
I like L.A., but it's just too many people in the same business everywhere you go. You lose perspective.
We retell our favorite stories. That's 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. That's how you can break new ground: by rethinking something that's already been done.
In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.
You're not able to do a lot of projects because you don't have a name. I wanted to get my movies to come over that hedge, so that I could do the movies that I wanted to do.
There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question, 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?', and they're finding out that, no, it's not like that. The body has intelligence itself, and we're much more of an organic creature in that way.
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.
It's always the thing when you're shooting out and about with real people and you could get a couple of bogeys like sticking their face in front of the camera, like 'Hey!'
We remake 'Hamlet' all the time. That's sort of what we do, humans.
What we did wrong on 'RoboCop,' we just did something new and didn't really take into account what the fans really loved about the original.
My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.
In philosophy, they talk a lot about humans being actual organic machines, and the idea of free will is something that we've made up. We actually don't have free will. We're acting according to our programming as organic mechanisms.
I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.
We have nobility in Sweden, and it comes from the old British aristocracy.