From EASY MONEY to THE KILLING, Joel Kinnaman, ROBOCOP Star, Talks Shop

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People have enjoyed sticking cameras toward Joel Kinnaman lately. I can dig it. This hatchet-faced Swedish-American is an intense dude, with a kind of lean and scruffy deadliness to him that’s usually reserved for a mongoose. And his career ascent since hitting the American media market has been nothing less than lightning fast.

Now we’re thrusting a microphone in his face, picking his brain to get a piece of this inexplicable hype hurricane that surrounds him. It’s kind of weird, since all he’s only co-starred in a number of films and series, and has yet to take a single hydraulically driven step as RoboCop. Joel Kinnaman is popular enough to merit an interview, though, and we can be glad for that.

He’s also our kind of people: A Gary Oldman fan with affection for gray morality.

The interview, conducted by Collider, covers the usual ground: What he enjoys most about acting (the strong bond between actors immersed in a powerful scene), and that he gets the biggest kick out of theater work.

He likes wounded characters. Characters with a moral void. Characters who are contradictory. Hey, who in their right mind doesn’t? My favorite part involved his account of playing a happy version of Raskolnikov in a recent stage production of Crime and Punishment.

Oh, yeah, and there are some spoilers, too.

Or, at least, secrets let slip when it comes to Robocop. Kinnaman indicated that he had “a lot of” scenes with Gary Oldman, but none, as he can recall, with Samuel L. Jackson. Perhaps no real shocker there – Oldman plays the scientist who pieces the cyborg together, Jackson’s cast as a “media mogul” – but it suggests that speculation over whether Jackson’s character is the Robocopy Big Bad Guy is likely wrong.

Other than that, the interview’s straightforward stock-in-trade for an actor interview. Kinnaman says he finds the RoboCop marketing “cool,” he loved working with the directors he’s worked with, they all remind him of each other in their talent, and so forth.

What is newsworthy is that all of this is for the occasion of a Kinnaman crime film getting picked up by Martin Scorcese and distributed in the US of A. Snabba Cash is the snappy name of this 2010 flick, “Easy Money” in English. It has gangsters, grifts and a borderline sociopath protagonist in the form of Kinnaman.

Definitely worth a look-see. Much like the rest of Joel Kinnaman’s surprisingly swift – but definitely worthy – career.