Joel Kinnaman

Charles Joel Nordström Kinnaman (; born 25 November 1979) is a Swedish actor. He first gained recognition for his roles in the 2010 Swedish film Easy Money and the Johan Falk crime series. Kinnaman is known internationally for his television roles as Detective Stephen Holder in AMC's The Killing, Takeshi Kovacs in the first season of Altered Carbon, and Governor Will Conway in the U.S. version of House of Cards. He has also played Alex Murphy in the 2014 RoboCop remake, and Rick Flag in the Warner Bros. film adaptations of the DC Comics anti-hero team Suicide Squad (2016), as well as James Gunn's 2021 sequel/soft reboot, The Suicide Squad. Since 2019, he has starred as NASA astronaut Ed Baldwin in the Apple TV+ science fiction drama series For All Mankind. Early life Charles Joel Nordström Kinnaman was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. His mother, Bitte (Nordström), a therapist, is a Swedish citizen. His father, Steve Kinnaman (originally David Kinnaman), is an American-born Swede who was drafted during the Vietnam War and deserted the military from his base in Bangkok. Kinnaman is a dual citizen of Sweden and the United States. His father, whose family was from the American Midwest, is of Irish and Scottish descent; whereas his mother is of maternal Ukrainian-Jewish descent. He has five sisters, one of whom is actress Melinda Kinnaman (paternal half-sister). During his childhood, Kinnaman learned two languages as he "spoke English with my dad and Swedish with my mom". He spent a year in Del Valle, Texas, as a high school exchange student. Prior, Kinnaman revealed that he grew up with fellow actors Alexander Skarsgård and Noomi Rapace. After graduating from high school, he decided to travel around the world. To finance the trips, he worked in various jobs as a beer factory line worker and roof-sweeper in Norway, and as a bar manager in the French Alps. He then traveled for four to five months at a time over a period of two years in Southeast Asia and South America, the latter with fellow Scandinavian actor David Dencik. Career Kinnaman began his acting career as a child actor in Swedish soap opera (1990). His older sister was dating one of the show's directors, and he asked Kinnaman to audition for a part on the show. After portraying Felix Lundström in 22 episodes, he stepped away from acting.