Kinnaman's specialism is the man in uniform who cannot say what he means and says something worse instead. He is better than most of the films that hire him for it, and best when a series gives him years to be quiet.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Ed Baldwin at the moment somebody asks him how he is. In For All Mankind (2019) Joel Kinnaman plays the astronaut as a man who cannot say what he feels and so says something rude instead, and the rudeness is doing a great deal of work: grief, pride and fear with the volume turned down and a jaw put in front of them. It is the thing he does best, and he has been doing it, in one uniform or another, for most of his career.
He began as a child in the Swedish soap Storstad (1990), went away, and came back the long way, through the Malmö Theatre Academy and the Swedish theatre and the Johan Falk series, before Easy Money (2010) made his name at home and abroad. By then he had already moved to Los Angeles, and The Killing (2011–2014) gave American viewers Stephen Holder, a detective with more troubles than his case. That is the pattern in miniature: a policeman or a soldier, a grey area, a man harder on the outside than he needs to be. He has said of the move that it "went pretty quickly – but on a personal level, it felt like it took a really long time", which is roughly the register he has played ever since.
What followed alternated between big films and long television. RoboCop (2014) put him inside a machine and asked him to stay human, which he managed; Suicide Squad (2016 and 2021) gave him Rick Flag, and most critics found the films around him muddled while noting that he went about his business as though he had not been told. House of Cards and Altered Carbon (2018) used him for the same thing, a hard surface with something coming apart behind it. The blockbusters serve him least well. They want the jaw and have no time for what is behind it, and a Kinnaman performance without its second half is only a fit man in a hurry. Two films with the director Daniel Espinosa suggest he is better when somebody already knows what he can do.
For All Mankind is the one that gave him room. Our review found the series slow to find its people and quicker with its hardware, and put his Ed above the writing he was handed, and we stand by both. We were more moved by him than we expected to be, and it was never the speeches; it was the look on him after he has said the wrong thing, knowing it was wrong and unable to take it back. Across the seasons that stillness accumulates, and the series slowly earns him.
What he needs next is a director who wants the quiet as much as the uniform. Until then, watch him on the moon, saying the wrong thing to the people who love him.
Biography
Joel Kinnaman is a Swedish-American actor. Born Charles Joel Nordström Kinnaman on 25 November 1979 in Stockholm, he holds dual Swedish and American citizenship.
He first gained recognition in Sweden for his lead role in the 2010 film Easy Money and appearances in the Johan Falk crime series. Internationally, he is known for playing Detective Stephen Holder in the AMC series The Killing (2011–2014), Takeshi Kovacs in the first season of Altered Carbon (2018), and Governor Will Conway in House of Cards (2013–2016). Film roles include Alex Murphy in the 2014 RoboCop remake and Rick Flag in Suicide Squad (2016) and The Suicide Squad (2021).
Since 2019, Kinnaman has starred as NASA astronaut Ed Baldwin in the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind. He trained at the Swedish Academic School of Drama and has a half-sister, actress Melinda Kinnaman.
