‘The First Time’ With Joel Kinnaman
Joel Kinnaman discussed his new movie The Secrets We Keep, working with Will Smith and the upcoming Suicide Squad sequel in the latest installment of Rolling Stone‘s The First Time.
Kinnaman kicked things off with his latest film The Secrets We Keep, out now, which he starred in alongside Noomi Rapace. The movie takes place post-WWII and centers around a Holocaust survivor (Rapace) who kidnaps her neighbor (Kinnaman), convinced that he’s the former Nazi who killed her sister.
Israeli filmmaker Yuval Adler was brought in to improve the script. “He really elevated it, and made it into something much more than just a Holocaust revenge story,” Kinnaman said. “It really felt like an entry into a discussion that has been convulsing the Western societies in the past couple of years and dealing with sexual violence and how you deal with accusations. We come at it from a different angle.”
Kinnaman also discussed working with Will Smith on 2016’s Suicide Squad. “He makes you feel like you have the best jokes,” he said. “He’s one of those guys that makes everyone feel good about themselves. And by that, everyone loves him for it. He just has that really infectious laughter. He took the air out of any anxiety around meeting him.”
Elsewhere in the segment, Kinnaman touched on The Suicide Squad, the comic book film sequel slated for 2021. He almost wasn’t able to star in the project, because the shooting conflicted with his show, For All Mankind. He met director James Gunn to discuss, though. “It was this heartbreaking first meeting,” he recalled. “He showed me all the artwork of the movie and I read the script, and it was fantastic. So I was really anxiety-ridden, because I was almost thinking that someone else was gonna get to go on this journey and not me, and continue this character that I built.”
However, his agents and For All Mankind showrunner Ron Moore pulled some strings so that Kinnaman could appear in the movie. “I will always be so grateful to him for that,” he said.