Joel Kinnaman Loved Getting Old for ‘For All Mankind’

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Joel Kinnaman Loved Getting Old for ‘For All Mankind’

Even when six hours in the makeup chair became “the hardest psychological challenge I’ve had to deal with.”
Photo: Courtesy of Apple

Spoilers follow for the fifth season of For All Mankind through the third episode, “Home,” which premiered on Friday, April 10.

For his 43-episode run on For All Mankind, Joel Kinnaman’s straight-backed, smirk-prone Ed Baldwin was the guy you turned to in a crisis. A pilot, astronaut, and commander who worked for the U.S. Navy, NASA, and aerospace company Helios, Ed had lately spurned the Establishment and lent his maverick tendencies to a new cause: autonomy for Mars and self-determination for Martian workers and citizens. It’s a mission that finally, heartbreakingly, kills him.

When season five begins, Ed is a leader in the separatist group the Sons and Daughters of Mars, a former agent of the ruling order now intent on destroying it. When he dies, it’s after helping longtime friend, North Korean defector, and fellow astronaut Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee) escape unfounded homicide charges on the Happy Valley base. Despite knowing flying would be a death sentence because of his advanced age and stage-three cancer, 81-year-old Ed knows he’s the only person who can break Lee out of prison and deliver him to asylum on a rival compound. “I, for one, will not abandon my friend,” Ed vows.

For All Mankind is a progressively minded show that demonstrates each season how people coming together can make valid, needed change. Even under layers of prosthetics, Kinnaman made Ed the model for that ideology, both in his activist work and his role as the patriarch of the Baldwin family, encouraging daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and grandson Alex (Sean Kaufman) to find their own passions. Ed’s deathbed reminiscing drives his final episode, from memories of his time lost in Korea to his early days with NASA (including surprise guest appearances from former cast members Michael Dorman, who played Ed’s best friend, Gordo, and Shantel VanSanten, who played Ed’s wife, Karen, both now dead).

Kinnaman has been the lead in a number of series including Swedish soap opera Storstad, Netflix’s adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s defining sci-fi novel Altered Carbon, and AMC cult-classic The Killing (his co-star from the The Killing, Mireille Enos, joined For All Mankind in season five). But he’s never been as emotional saying good-bye to a role as he was with Ed Baldwin, whom he calls the “moral center” of the show. “My little inner rebel gets to live out in these characters,” Kinnaman says. “The writers were very astute on picking those things up. They had such integrity with the character and such a long-term vision that was beautifully executed.”

For All Mankind fans are so excited that Ed is still shit-stirring on Mars in his 80s. Did you know Ed would be on the show this long?
When I met with creators Ron Moore and Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi in early 2018, they gave me the five-season pitch. Basically, everything they were talking about has now come to fruition. I knew I was gonna play Ed at 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80. That was what I had to look forward to. They brought me into the conversation they were having about how to send off Ed, and there was a little concern, because Ed is the heart and soul of the show. The idea was to take the audience a little bit by surprise and then pass the baton, so it was so cool to play that with young Kaufman. He’s so talented, such a warm kid. I loved seeing where the Baldwins are going. And it was so cool to get to see Mireille.

As someone who still casually says, “Yo, Linden,” I was slightly disappointed that you and Mireille didn’t have a scene together.
I don’t think we caught it on-camera, but we had a moment when she comes up to me, and I was sitting in a chair, and I was like, “What’s up, Linden?” I had to throw it out there. [Laughs]

What was your initial reaction to the script with the details of how Ed would die, sacrificing himself to save Lee? Are we seeing exactly what was scripted?
My experience on For All Mankind has been very different from other shows, where I’ve gotten scripts sent to me and I’m like, Sorry, I don’t find this dialogue believable or This is too big of a jump. Every script I got from For All Mankind was, “I get to do this? I get to say this? Thank you.” It’s so lived-in. Of course, we had a lot of conversations. I threw out a bunch of ideas over the course of the show, and there’s always little improvisations. I’m pretty good at finding little quirks in characters, and in both For All of Mankind and The Killing, the writers were particularly good at picking up on my improvisations and building them out. Both Baldwin and Holder [his character in The Killing] became characters that could kind of do anything. They don’t give a shit. I think I have a little bit of that, and when I’m playing, that gets enhanced.

What was one of those quirks?
How I started cursing. I was like [shifts his voice into Ed’s more high-pitched cursing]: “Goddamn son of a bitch!” There was a moment when Ed could almost be in a Medea movie.

A Tyler Perry Medea movie?
Yeah, or more like an Eddie Murphy impersonation, if there was, like, an African American mom played by Eddie Murphy version of Ed Baldwin. That was in my weird mind. But the way that I was cursing, how I like to tease people, Ed’s passion about random things and how certain things really pissed him off — those were expanded upon. After the pasta scene where I did that mountain of Parmesan, I felt like [does Ed’s voice again], “Parmesan, this is the best cheese. There’s nothing better than this cheese.” And then that would be incorporated into every pasta scene after that. That’s what happens when there’s a good relationship between an actor and a group of writers, where you all fall in love with this character. I get to be him, and then these little things occur to you, and then all of a sudden it becomes real.

Tell me how you understood Ed at this point in his life. He’s older, but he’s still very mischievous. He’s disciplined because of his time in the military, but he believes in the power of collective action.
He revolted against his own environment. This turn in him, I didn’t really see that coming. Ed had this moral center where he really did care about the collective — even though in his younger years, he’s very much driven by his ego and his lust for exploration and glory — but I think that the whole idea of Mars, and this joint venture of humanity reaching out, and how tired he was of fucking politics, inspires his singular focus. He wants to push the envelope for humanity and make humans a multi-planetary species, and as this Martian identity starts to form and Mars becomes the new world, Earth becomes the old world, the colonizer. That’s where that collectivism really comes from; it’s this identity of Martians.

What fascinates me about Ed is that he is also so flawed. He is someone who has been egotistical, and he has sacrificed his family for his own personal ambition. He’s made a lot of mistakes in his life. But at the same time, he’s not driven by the consensus view. He will go his own way, and the older he gets, that means moving more against the Establishment. I love that about him — that he had his moral compass and that he would follow it, no matter who that put him up against.

I’m curious about the prosthetics, the walk, the voice, and how you developed those aspects of Ed at 81. Can you walk me through the process?
I’ve always loved pretending to be old. There’s this Swedish actor, Ernst-Hugo Järegård, who was one of my heroes. He died even before I became an actor, but he recorded these master classes when he knew he was dying that I would watch before every new role. He has a bunch of tricks of how to play old. When you’re walking, if you fold your toes under your feet inside your shoes and then walk, you’ll automatically get an old man’s walk. You’re walking on your toes, it hurts a little bit, and it gives that little instability.

I found it a lot more difficult to play 60 and 70. It’s extremely relative, how you age, and how that expresses in the body. In season four, in particular, it was very heavy lifting for the character. When I look back at it, I was like, I should have done more. There was room for improvement. I was thinking a lot about spending this much time on a base where the air is going to be refiltered and recirculated and dry. That’s going to have a longer-term effect on your vocal cords, so I wanted to make a bigger shift in the voice.

For season five, filming was a month, not six months, so I stayed in my old age in this shell of Ed in between takes and during the day. It was very important that the outward tempo was much slower than the inward tempo. The internal tempo, it’s still going a mile a minute inside there. So a lot of the work was to always have that outside tempo slow but still be natural. The difficult thing when you’re playing a character like this is, if you’re always focused on the physicality, then you’re not entirely present. You have to practice enough so that’s just running on automatic in the background, so on the day you don’t have to think about it. Your attention has to be in the listening and being present with the people who you’re playing with. You hear every little nuance of what they’re saying and how they’re saying it, so when you’re answering, you feel like you’re connected and in sync. If you’re thinking about how you’re moving your hand or sitting down, then you’re not completely connected there, and the audience won’t feel like it’s alive.

Tell me about Ed’s heh-heh-heh laugh. When he purposefully sets off his ankle monitor by sticking it in Happy Valley’s control room, he’s so amused by himself.
It just felt like my old laugh, how I’m going to be laughing when I’m that age. There are moments when I laugh like that in real life, especially when I’m teasing my wife.

How long were you in the makeup chair to get Ed in his older age?
The fourth season was by far the worst. We had this fucking beard that I still have nightmares of. I was there for over five hours in the makeup chair. Sometimes I was in the chair at 1 a.m., and then we’d shoot at 7 a.m. for a full 12-hour day that sometimes went over, and then it took an hour to get out of the makeup. I was often doing 18- to 20-hour days. And that makeup was constantly itching. It was a beard wig, but then loose hair on top of it, and then for 12, 13 hours a day, everyone is poking at your face and your eyelids and putting hair on. They do the absolute best job they can, and they’re really good at what they do, and they’re trying to make it easy, but the nature of it is difficult. It is probably the hardest psychological challenge I’ve had to deal with. I’d be meditating for hours a day to not, like, lose my shit at people. But in the fifth season, the result was a lot better in terms of makeup and prosthetics. That only took two and a half hours, and by the end of it, only two hours. The pieces were a lot bigger.

Photo: Courtesy of Apple

I want to ask you about what Ed goes through in his final episode. For part of it, you’re playing Ed again in his youth, with flashbacks to when he was captured in Korea. He parachutes into the jungle, he’s trying to survive, he sees his fellow pilot get killed. Tell me about that.
The Korea episode has been an ongoing topic between me and the writers for, like, four years. There was always this idea of a flashback going back to when Ed was captured in Korea. Every season, I was like, “Are we doing the Korea episode?” They’d written several versions of it, and then every season they ended up scrapping it because it didn’t fit into the narrative. They made a lot of tough choices and killed a lot of darlings. That they were able to find a version of the Korea episode in that last episode, it bookended so many things for Ed. I got to play the youngest and the oldest version of Ed in the same episode. We shot that up here in Malibu. I had just moved in here, I was in the process of selling my Venice place, and so I was sitting in full prosthetics, texting with movers. We shot at Ronald Reagan’s old ranch near Malibu Creek State Park. It’s a beautiful part of Malibu. It all burned like a year later.

Ed is incredibly ill after his flight to save Lee, but he leaves the medical bay to go to Ilya’s bar. He’s joined by his daughter, Kelly, and his grandson, Alex, who have accepted that he’s refusing cancer treatment. Tell me about playing this three-generation scene with Sean and Cynthy.
It has been wonderful working with Cynthy, or Wu Wu, as I call her. She came in in season two, and she was lying to everyone about her age. She was playing 14 or 15, but actually, she just looked like a baby. [Laughs] They needed someone who could get away with playing that young, and then she needs to age at least three decades. Cynthy, when she put it on, really looked like a young teenager, and she kind of was [acting that way]. The first season, I wasn’t really talking to real Cynthy. Then the second season, when she was playing closer to her own age, I was like, Oh, I see what you’ve been doing, and we’ve become good friends. Then Sean came in with the perfect attitude, where he was putting his stink on the character and making his mark, but he was very gentle and respectful. It was such a nice moment — passing the torch, in a way.

You three are doing shots, and you know that Alex has drank alcohol before, but Kelly doesn’t, so you tell him under your breath to pretend in front of his mother that it’s his first time. It was a perfect grandfather-grandson moment.
I think that’s all improvised, too. I don’t think any of that was on the page. I was playing around quite a bit. Alex was right there with me, both him and Dimiter [Marinov], the actor who plays Ilya.The whole last episode was so emotional.

As Ed is dying, he imagines himself in his NASA space suit, and he’s with Gordo walking down a hallway lined with clapping engineers and scientists, and his wife, Karen, and son, Shane, are waiting to kiss Ed good-bye before he goes into space. Gordo, Karen, and Shane are all dead in the show. Tell me about working with Michael and Shantel again.
They killed me with these flashback moments where Michael shows up. Gordo and Ed were best friends, and Michael and I became really close friends. Michael is one of my favorite people in the world, and I missed him. We were just looking at each other, smiling, and it was a really special moment between us, and the same with Shantel. The last thing we shot was in that classic capsule that we still had from the first season. We’d gone over by two hours, it was like 1:30 a.m. I get in my car and drive out to Malibu, where I have five friends from Sweden and my now-wife waiting for me, because we’re gonna go to Burning Man to get married. Hours later, I was in Northern California, driving this 40-foot RV with so many different emotions in my mind. I didn’t even know where I was anymore.

The whole last week of shooting the show, I was a total mess, and I’m still unpacking why it got to me that much. I was deeply emotional. It’s the character that has been with me the longest. We’ve been doing this for almost eight years. As actors, we create these little short-term families where we all fall in love and then we say good-bye. It’s not that sentimental, but this was completely different. I was floored by it, and I think there was something about playing this character in all these different ages, and experiencing this gradual aging, and envisioning me being this age. It put my own mortality at the forefront of my mind. In the end here, I’m playing the same age as my dad is now, and I’m on my deathbed saying good-bye to my grandson and my daughter. It puts the inevitability of life right there in front of your eyes.