Joel Kinnaman
“It was so fascinating to see how this strong allAmerican deals with the ultimate tragedy and how that broke him and how it changed him.”
From the Soviets beating the U.S. to the moon to humans finally making it to Mars, Apple TV’S “For All Mankind” imagines an alternate history of space exploration. Joel Kinnaman leads the series as astronaut Ed Baldwin, a role the Swedish-born actor calls “a gift” for being able to portray the conflicted protagonist across decades. Ahead of “For All Mankind” wrapping its fourth season, Kinnaman spoke with Variety about the appeal of astronauts, asteroid heists and conflicted all-american heroes.
• What drew you to “For All Mankind” and your character, Ed Baldwin? First off, he was this American archetype, this all-american hero. And to me, it’s not particularly interesting to play that guy. That’s why this was so fascinating because he was that on the outside, but on the inside there was something entirely different going on. He was a man who wasn’t really able to handle his emotions … not able to handle his rage. When he suffers the ultimate tragedy of losing his child, he starts to fall apart and becomes something different. Then over the course of several seasons, it’s really a deconstruction of that archetype.
• From hair and makeup to changes in physicality, what’s it been like playing Ed as he ages? If we didn’t have an incredible makeup team that really made it happen — the whole show stands and falls on it. It’s mentally the most difficult thing I’ve done in my professional life. I would get up around midnight, get in the makeup chair at 1 a.m. and be in the chair until 7 a.m. Then you tack on a 12- to 14-hour day on top of that. Also, when you got that makeup on, it’s very itchy, very uncomfortable. So it was demanding mentally to keep an even keel and to stay in a mentally good space.
• Coming into Season 4, Ed has suffered two major losses — his wife, Karen, and his best friend’s son, Danny. Where would you say Ed is mentally this season? I think loss is something that the older we get, the more it’s part of life. But of course, the seminal moment for Ed is losing Shane, his son, at the end of the first season. That changes him. For me, it was so fascinating to see how this strong all-american deals with the ultimate tragedy and how that broke him and how it changed him. Then he loses his wife, his best friend and also his best friend’s son.
Ed is more and more cutting his ties with everything. It becomes an inability to face his grief and his loss. I think he is so utterly afraid of becoming irrelevant and living without purpose.
• The show explores what could have been with space exploration. Are you disappointed that we haven’t gone nearly as far as the show? I think it would be great if Elon just forgot about X and just focused on Spacex instead. It’ll do a lot more good. That is such a waste of his time. … It’s an exciting time now because I think that in the past five to 10 years, we’ve seen more activity and we’ve come so much further than the previous 30 years. So finally, things are starting to happen. I also hope that we get more of these UFO revelations, and more whistleblowers come out. I have this hope that if we as a world really got the information that we are being visited by outside intelligence, that could be something that unified us and made us look up into the stars more than looking at these internal power struggles, and more resources would be put on space.