For a while it seemed as though Joel Kinnaman would remain relegated to B-grade thriller territory for some time following the collapse of the DC Extended Universe. Films like 2019’s “The Informer” and 2024’s “The Silent Hour” didn’t bode well for the actor, who’d played Rick Flag Jr. in the DCEU since 2016’s “Suicide Squad.” Thankfully, he’s thriving on the small screen. While his film career started to look a little more promising when Kinnaman starred in action thriller and major Prime Video hit “Icefall,” there’s no doubt the man has been doing his best work on TV.
The Swedish-American actor got his start in acting at the age of 11 when he appeared in 22 episodes of soap opera “Storstad” in his native Sweden. Now, he’s leading Apple TV’s excellent “For All Mankind” and that’s far from his only TV success. Kinnaman was introduced to international audiencese Killing,” and has since shown up in several prestige series including two seasons of Netflix’s “House of Cards.”
While Kinnaman’s other Apple TV series “Imperfect Women” was a star-studded disappointment, for the most part he has enjoyed solid TV success. He’s now set to appear in the upcoming Prime Video thriller series “Bishop” which looks like another promising TV project. With that in mind, now’s a great time to take a look back at Kinnaman’s television career by ranking his five best TV shows.
5. Altered Carbon
Netflix’s Cyberpunk sci-fi series “Altered Carbon” was fairly short-lived despite boasting an incredibly well-realized and immersive world alongside a solid lead performance from Joel Kinnaman. The ten-episode first season premiered on Netflix back in 2018, followed by an eight-episode second season in 2020 which saw Anthony Mackie take on the lead role. After that, Netflix canceled “Altered Carbon.” But the show remains one of Kinnaman’s most memorable small-screen outings.
Based on Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel of the same name, “Altered Carbon” Season 1 is set in Bay City in the year 2384, where digital backups of human consciousness are now the norm. These backups, stored on small disks, can be inserted into the vertebrae of any human body, thereby imbuing that body with the consciousness stored on the disk in a process known as re-sleeving. In Season 1, Kinnaman plays Takeshi “Tak” Kovacs, a former member of a group of super soldiers known as Envoys, who were ultimately killed after rebelling against the ruling order of their era. 250 years after being imprisoned, Kovacs is released at the behest of the wealthy Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who has him re-sleeved into the body of police officer Elias Ryker in order to have him solve a murder — Bancroft’s own.
Mackie played Kovacs’ new host body in Season 2, at which point Kinnaman stepped away from the series. But his lead performance in Season 1 was typically great, especially since it saw him playing what was essentially a dual role in both Kovacs and Ryker. If you missed this one when it hit Netflix, it’s well worth seeking out. Even the anime feature that acted as a prequel to Season 1, “Altered Carbon: Resleeved” was solid.
4. Hanna
In 2011, Joe Wright unleashed his action thriller “Hanna,” which saw Irish actor Saoirse Ronan in the title role as a girl who’d been trained her ex-CIA father (Eric Bana) to become a killing machine. In 2019, Prime Video turned the Ronan-led film into a series also named “Hanna,” this time with Esme Creed-Miles in the lead and Joel Kinnaman playing her father figure, Erik Heller.
The show begins with Erik and Hanna living in a remote part of a Polish forest. Turns out Erik’s prior role at the CIA required him to recruit pregnant women for a program that enhanced their children’s DNA in order to create an army of child super-soldiers. But Erik ended up falling for Hanna’s mother before escaping the program with an infant Hanna. Now essentially fugitives, the pair are being hunted by CIA operative Marissa Wiegler (Kinnaman’s former “The Killing” co-star Mireille Enos), who’s been ordered to eliminate every trace of the controversial program.
Creed-Miles is the standout here, managing to somehow convey both the quiet steeliness of Hanna and her more vulnerable side. But Kinnaman helps boost that performance thanks to the chemistry between him and his younger co-star. Though the pair often clash and, at times it seems as though Erik might not be as benevolent a figure as he initially seems, you buy their unbreakable bond from the very beginning. That’s a testament to the pair’s performances, and it makes “Hanna” one of Kinnaman’s best TV shows.
3. Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole
In 2017, Tomas Alfredson adapted Jo Nesbø’s novel “The Snowman” and the result was disappointing at best. The crime thriller book deserved a better movie adaptation and while we still haven’t gotten it, we have got the next best thing. “Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole” is a Netflix series that adapts the fifth book in the Norwegian novelist’s Harry Hole series, “The Devil’s Star.” This time, however, Nesbø writes and executive produces, ensuring his
Part of that project involves Joel Kinnaman, who in the series plays crooked cop Tom Waaler. Waaler is a colleague of the titular detective (played by Tobias Santelmann), and in the very first installment of the 9-episode series finds himself in hot water after he’s identified as being at a crime scene. But Kinnaman always excels at playing coolly removed villains, and that’s exactly what’s on display here. Santelmann is obviously the focus, and he does an excellent job playing the haunted cop, even managing to overcome some of the plentiful clichés associated with that archetype. But Kinnaman is truly odious in a slick and compelling way, and it’s great to see.
It’s also just cool to see him in a Scandinavian noir. Though he hails from Sweden, he’s obviously very comfortable with the Nordic language and any fan of the actor should get a kick out of seeing him so effortlessly portray a crooked Oslo cop. There’s also a great score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and directors Øystein Karlsen and Anna Zackrisson are more than capable of delivering the slick, slow-burn style associated with the Scandi-noir genre. Add to that the fact that Nesbø’s work is finally getting the on-screen treatment it deserves and you’ve got a must-see Kinnaman show.
2. For All Mankind
The lead in “For All Mankind” seems like an actor’s dream role — a sprawling showcase of a life presented in 10-year increments that demands a certain level of talent to pull off convincingly. That’s exactly what Joel Kinnaman did as Edward Baldwin in the Apple TV sci-fi series.
A Helios Aerospace astronaut, formerly of NASA, who helped oversee humankind’s expansion to Mars, Baldwin might be Kinnaman’s most fully realized character. Across five seasons, the actor plays Baldwin at the age of 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80, and with each new season he delivers something new and surprising, revealing new depths to his character as he struggles with the loss of his son. That’s doubly impressive considering the latter seasons see Kinnaman battling against dodgy aging prosthetics that threaten to undermine the otherwise impressive hard sci-fi realism of “For All Mankind.” As distractingly bad as the makeup effects got, however, Kinnaman was never less than convincing in the role.
“For All Mankind” is ending with Season 6 having long since established itself as one of the best sci-fi shows of the 2020s. Chronicling an alternate history wherein the Soviets are first to land on the moon, the show is a thrilling, expansive, frequently moving show about a world where collective efforts to better humankind actually lead to demonstrable results. As drama-filled as it is, “For All Mankind” is ultimately a hopeful show and so much of that is epitomized by Kinnaman, without whom it’s safe to say the show simply wouldn’t be what it is.
1. The Killing
After the debacle that was “The Darkest Hour,” Joel Kinnaman made up for a less than impressive international debut with what remains his best TV performance yet. “The Killing” is based on the Scandinavian series “Forbrydelsen” and starred Kinnaman as Seattle homicide detective Stephen Holder, alongside Mireille Enos as his partner Sarah Linden. When we first meet Holder, he’s only just transferred from narcotics and is rough around the edges to say the least. Though ambitious, he lacks crucial social skills and often allows his streetwise nature, developed during a troubled upbringing in a disadvantaged neighborhood, to overcome his professionalism.
But as the show goes on Holder undergoes an evolution. Part of that was due to the writers wanting to keep Holder somewhat of a mystery. As Kinnaman told TVLine, “They didn’t know if he was a good guy or a bad guy […] I couldn’t be charming, because they wanted to keep the audience on the fence.” But by Season 2 we were already starting to see more depth to Holder as Kinnaman grew into the character. By Season 3, he was a smartly-dressed professional studying for the Sergeant’s exam and it was impressive to see how Kinnaman effortlessly rendered that transformation.
Season 4 delved even further into his character as he struggled with his substance addiction and the prospect of becoming a father, and once again he never faltered. Throughout, Kinnaman portrayed Holder with a studied determination that conveyed his deep love of the character and ultimately made for his best small screen performance. It helped, of course, that “The Killing” was one of the best TV shows of the 2010s, but without Kinnaman it arguably wouldn’t be able to make that claim.
