Joel Kinnaman On For All Mankind, Husbands, Detective Hole & Bishop

From Mars to Iraq by way of San Francisco and Juno Temple’s loft… Joel Kinnaman is keeping busy. When the actor meets with Deadline in a London restaurant, he has just filmed his part in Apple TV’s The Husbands, and Imperfect Women and the latest season of For All Mankind have launched on Apple TV. He has a major role in Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole for Netflix, has been shooting Bishop for Prime Video, and has been in the edit on Iraq War drama High Value Target (formerly Debriefing the President) for TNT.

With that many shows to talk about, where to start? Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole is still riding high in Netflix’s viewing charts and feels like a good place to pick up Kinnaman’s recent story.

Harry Hole

“There’s a level of extremity in his storytelling,” Kinnaman says of Nesbø. The author does not play by the rules of Scandi Noir, the actor adds, and he should know about that sober crime genre having been in the U.S. remake of The Killing. “He’s not bound by any sort of Scandinavian restraint in his storytelling. His imagination is remarkable and he’s so prolific.”

In the series, Kinnaman is Tom Waaler, a corrupt and volatile Swedish cop. “He’s clearly not a good guy,” Kinnaman says of Waaler. “I defined him as a malignant narcissist. That was a psychological framework that I found useful. It’s like the step before a sociopath.”

Kinnaman speaks Swedish in the show and it’s prompted him to pursue more Swedish-language work.

“I realized I have another gear in Swedish that I haven’t used for 15 years,” he explains. “It has become so clear to me how important it is for me to do stuff regularly in Swedish. I’m now committed to doing at least one [Swedish-language] project every 18 months. My next project after Bishop is Swedish.”

When he sits down with Deadline, Kinnaman is fresh back from Montreal, which doubles for San Francisco in Prime Video crime drama Bishop. He headlines this one as Bishop Graves, a battle-scarred cop on the trail of a serial killer. John Malkovich plays Bishop’s father, Lincoln.

“I play the son of a billionaire, an oligarch, but I have chosen a completely different path,” he explains. “His response to his childhood trauma was to become a police detective, but a very extreme type of police detective who flirts with death and has a need for adrenaline. It’s close to being suicidal being that adrenaline driven.”

Debriefing Becomes High Value

Changing gears to talk about a show on which he’s also an exec producer, Kinnaman says High Value Target has assumed a latter-day resonance with war in the Middle East once more in the headlines. In the series, initially developed for TNT as Debriefing the President, he plays John Nixon, the CIA agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein (Waleed Zuaiter). With no firm launch date in place, the series is expected to play later this year.

“It’s going to be so relevant because it’s about how the U.S. got into the Iraq War. The most maddening thing right now is how history is just repeating itself and it’s something that so clearly nobody wants. And I think this show definitely digs into some of the reasons [for the Iraq war]. It was built on a set of lies. They weren’t misunderstandings or miscalculations.”

The series is based on Nixon’s non-fiction book ‘Debriefing the President.’ “John Nixon’s journey is fascinating because he was brought in, and he had drunk some of the Kool-Aid, but then comes to an understanding that, you know, this is all bullshit. This is just going to make things worse.”

As an exec as well as the lead, Kinnaman’s clearly excited about the show, but also says making it pushed him to the limit. “I’ve never worked that hard in my life. There were ten times the amount of headaches you get on a normal show and it was also a very taxing and demanding role. It was just heavy. I was close to getting burnt out. It was a bit like my ‘Heart of Darkness.’”

Imperfect Women & For All Mankind

After a grueling shoot in Egypt on a gritty Iraq War drama that left him drained, Kinnaman planned a break after wrapping High Value Target. In fact, he jumped straight on to Apple’s Imperfect Women with Elisabeth Moss, Kerry Washington and his fellow House of Cards alum Kate Mara.

“I said, ‘No, I’m not going back to work right away.’ Then I just started reading the material, and I thought, this is really fun. And I love all those actors so I got drawn in. I was so happy that I did it, because it was so fun to be able to go in and not be the lead… just go in and just play.”

Another series of a timely nature is For All Mankind. With Artemis III having journeyed to space, the Apple series is in orbit on its fifth season. Kinnaman breaks down the latest chapter of the show, which started out depicting an alternate version of the Space Race and, as the years have moved on, now has humans colonizing the Red Planet.

“There’s tension around the movement for Martian independence and the identity of people in the Mars Colony. Their identity is moving more around being Martian. They are abandoning the internal politics of the countries that they came from and realizing that their future is there.”

The narrative in this season has echoes of issues here on modern-day planet Earth. “There’s very much a class struggle at its core and it’s also about immigration, because there’s a lot of illegal settlers now on Mars that are coming up in containers and living in this colony.”

An attic of Husbands

Back on Earth and in North London, Deadline’s time with Kinnaman comes to a close with a chat about The Husbands, a project he has been filming on this side of the Pond.

“It was a fun, quick pop and sort of happened because I was already in the neighborhood,” Kinnaman says about playing one of Temple’s many spouses in the show, which hails from A24. Safe to say this one is high-concept. Temple plays Lauren, who returns to her London flat one night and is greeted by her husband. The problem is she’s never seen this man before. As Lauren tries to fathom how she is seemingly married to someone she can’t remember meeting, her hubby disappears into the attic, only for a new man to emerge and another version of her life begins.

Kinnaman is in great company in the cast of The Husbands, with Joe Alwyn, Richard Gadd, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Daniel Ings, Bob Morley and Fehinti Balogun also each playing one of Temple’s spouses.

The actor breaks down his part: “Her husband goes up in the attic, and another man comes down… all of a sudden she’s in this other version of her life with this new husband. And then when he goes up in the attic, another one comes down, and everything changes again.

“It’s like each husband is representing an alternate timeline. I come down and am her posh, wealthy Swedish husband and everything seems to be perfect, but actually she’s not happy.”

Between back-to-back-to-back acting and EP’ing, Kinnaman has an indie movie project and a Swedish series coming up. That seemingly would leave little room for anything else, but there is another itch the star wants to scratch – moving behind the camera.

“I’m looking for projects to direct and that’s one of my next steps. I’ll probably find a project where I’m in it, but maybe not the lead. I actually have one thing in mind,” he teases. In the meantime, there’s the small matter of the Apple, Netflix, Prime and TNT series.