Joel Kinnaman has earned heaps of praise for playing Kevin Spacey’s presidential opponent in the fourth season of the Netflix political drama House of Cards. The Swedish actor portrays Republican governor Will Conway, a brash, young, press-savvy candidate who persuades young voters to support him through viral videos and selfies. Offscreen, Kinnaman has been keeping up with American politics—and is fascinated by this year’s volatile executive race. Less than 100 days from now, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be elected president. The outcome is anyone’s guess—but Kinnaman can’t understand how Trump became the Republican presidential nominee.
“Nothing is crazier than what’s going on right now in the real world,” Kinnaman, 36, told Vanity Fair at the world premiere of his latest movie, Suicide Squad, in New York on Monday evening. “I can’t believe people are seriously considering electing a man who doesn’t know that Russia invaded Ukraine and Crimea, a man who called a woman in public a fat pig, and a man talking about how big his dick is. That’s not a man fit to be president.”
Kinnaman supported his critical comments by explaining that Trump made headlines two days ago when the mogul promised that Vladimir Putin was not going to invade Ukraine—even though the Russian president did just that two years ago. As for the name-calling: Trump got into a public war with Rosie O’Donnell in 2006, after O’Donnell criticized Trump’s decision not to strip a Miss USA winner of her title after she was caught drinking underage. Firing back, Trump referred to O’Donnell as a “fat pig.” He also called her “my nice, fat little Rosie.” A year later at the Learning Annex Real Estate and Wealth Expo, Trump called O’Donnell a “disgusting pig.”
The actor, who has dual citizenship in Sweden and the U.S., calls the presidential election much-more absurd than any story line used in House of Cards (where, lest we forget, the vice president of the United States once murdered a reporter by pushing her in front of a subway train).
“We haven’t done anything on the show that is close to being as crazy and over the top compared to the real presidential election,” said Kinnaman. “That’s scary. It seems like our fictional show is more believable than reality. That’s how crazy it is.”
In the meantime, moviegoers can forget about politics and see the former star of AMC’s The Killing partake in ridiculous action-packed sequences with Will Smith in the comic-book movie—Kinnaman's biggest film project to date. He plays Colonel Rick Flag, an elite combat-operative field leader who shepherds a group of super-villains to save the world.
When asked if Trump would qualify to become a member of the Suicide Squad, Kinnaman joked: “He would be the craziest one. But I would have to take him down. The world would be safer.”
