Joel Kinnaman on Caring, Communication and Crafting a Challenging Career
The star of ‘The Silent Hour’ reflects on his recent string of films where he finds a way to circumvent the traditions within specific genres and the artform he loves.
If you’re the only son in a family with five sisters, likely, you’re going to stand out. If you’re a 6’ 2” Swede with a frame large enough to pull off Robocop, you’re going to get noticed. If you play a character that has no superpowers and yet goes toe-to-toe with some of DC’s most notorious baddies, chances are, subtlety is not your issue. The point is, actor Joel Kinnaman has often been a larger than life figure, both on and off screen. If there’s something he needs to communicate, even in his more subtle, soft-spoken roles, you’re going to hear what he has to say.
Which might explain why the international star of action and drama has recently chosen roles where he gives himself an obstacle when it comes to communication. Last year, Kinnaman partnered with action-auteur John Woo to bring audiences ‘Silent Night’, where the film tried to reinvent the action genre with as little dialogue as possible. Now, Kinnaman finds himself once again reinventing a genre and reuniting with director Brad Anderson in ‘The Silent Hour’. Kinnaman plays Frank Shaw, a detective who while pursuing a suspect, sustains a head injury which leaves him almost entirely deaf.
Kinnaman is jokingly asked about completing his “Silent” trilogy possibly next year, should the trend continue. The imposing Scandinavian, in a very dry but quick-witted manner, reassures everyone “it's coming. I become blind in this one”.
All jokes aside, Kinnaman seemingly realizes the importance of trying to reinvent what could otherwise be a very tried, tested and at times tired super-cop action genre. Not simply to try and give audiences something new, but to shine a light on what the genre is capable of. Kinnaman thinks “The Silent Hour” can teach audiences quite a bit about resiliency,
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Within the film, Shaw struggles with the newfound hearing loss, and in the first act has to deal with the recent development. Limiting his communication in his recent films has challenged Kinnaman as an actor, but apparently showed him something even deeper. “It really teaches you something about the human experience when something gets taken away from you” he reveals. “There is something very interesting about the human experience, that if your outlook on life is positive, and if you find a way to find acceptance within your situation, you can still live a very full life.”
Kinnaman continues, saying the challenge of playing the character really affected him personally, more than simply learning what life might be like for those who have to deal with physical challenges. “I realized that while we were shooting Silent Hour, we were shooting the final scene, and I actually understood what the movie was about. I got really emotional while we were shooting it, because I started thinking about everyone that had been in that situation”.
Yet, as mentioned, ‘challenge’ seems to be Kinnaman’s middle name (it’s actually Nordström, which at the very least, is an actual challenge to spell with the umlaut popping up randomly). Whether he’s covering up half of his face in Robocop, not uttering a word, or learning sign language for this role, Kinnaman has consistently challenged the method in which he communicates, which naturally, is a key tool for any performer.
If it weren’t enough to simply challenge himself in each role, Kinnaman is developing quite a theory about the genre that has made him so popular with international audiences. He has played law enforcement of some kind in dozens of projects, including ‘The Killing’, which perhaps was the first time he became a household name in North America.
Like the specific contrivances of his most recent action films, Kinnaman believes there’s so much studios can do with this insanely popular genre. “The [action genre] is sort of a loose shape of a movie, and it's a world that people have an easy time to associate with.” Kinnaman says. “Maybe not so much from real experience, but because they've seen a lot of action films. The trick is to be able to do something new in that format and to infuse it with a real experience - an underlying theme that transcends the genre element of it”.
Clearly Kinnaman feels The Silent Hour fits that exact mould. “It really taught me something about life. It's like an action movie and fast paced, but the underlying theme, as I understand it, is acceptance - finding acceptance for yourself and when you do that, then you can live a full life.
Aside from the challenges he imposes on himself, Kinnaman is also no stranger to pressure, having appeared in two of DC’s massive comic book properties in ‘Suicide Squad’, and it’s verbose titled sequel ‘The Suicide Squad’. In today’s cinematic environment, it would be difficult to find a more pressure filled project than a Marvel or DC movie. The amount of money that’s thrown towards them, the publicity, the audience reaction (and often over reaction) can be overwhelming. So when Kinnaman and others get the opportunity to make a socially responsible and original production like The Silent Hour, Kinnaman’s perspective may be somewhat unique. Obviously he remains professional regardless of the production he’s creating, but perhaps having survived the DC pressure machine, it allows him to take on films like this which try and tackle something new within an established genre. Or perhaps it’s simply that Kinnaman has been around the block before and doesn’t feel pressure at all anymore.
“Those movies get a lot more attention, and they have a lot bigger budgets. So of course, the stakes are a little bit higher” Kinnaman admits. “But I don't know, I feel like an old hand now. I’ve been in this game for a while, so I don't really care that much. I'm more interested in the essence of the film, who I'm working with and how excited I am about it”. Until Kinnaman said that, this writer was unaware that “Cool as a cucumber” was originally a Swedish idiom, but it should be reiterated, it’s not about Kinnaman being indifferent, it’s the actor choosing what to care about.
“I think if you continuously work hard and challenge yourself and try to find projects that keep it a little scary, that's like the most important thing. I think, with anything in life, if it stops being scary, then you're not challenging yourself. As an actor, you kind of have to keep doing that. So that's good if the superhero thing scares you a little bit, but for me, it's more about focussing on finding the right challenge.”