Joel Kinnaman: I believe that this life is all we have. I don't believ...

Swedes are a really humble and shy people in many ways, but I think it's pretty much the same as in the U.S. Little girls want to take photographs with me at lunch.

Joel Kinnaman

girl humble thinking

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.

Joel Kinnaman

father kids school

As actors we're like these vagabond artists, we have to be invited to perform so if you don't have a choice of options its very hard to define yourself.

Joel Kinnaman

vagabonds choices artist

I don't think there have been many alien movies where the actors have actually seen the aliens.

Joel Kinnaman

actors aliens thinking

You have to think before speaking. That's a quality I'm continuously evolving. For some reason, it seems like I'm bumping my head into the wall a little bit too many times.

Joel Kinnaman

wall quality thinking

You can make an interesting character in a small portion of a movie, for a character that doesn't have that much on the page, if you just find the contradictions. That's something that I try to bring to my performances.

Joel Kinnaman

trying character interesting

I used to throw up before I went on stage, every time. Even though it's only 200 people in the audience, and a movie like RoboCop is going to be seen by many, many people, I know I'd be much more nervous doing a play than being on set shooting.

Joel Kinnaman

shooting play people

I hate pork rinds. I couldn’t imagine how anybody would ever get the idea of taking skin from a pig and frying it and then trying to sell it to people. And then people actually buy it to eat it. That is the true sign of the decline of the human race.

Joel Kinnaman

hate race pigs

I usually have pretty good intuition on projects that I work on.

Joel Kinnaman

intuition projects

I think for a lot of people that had seen me do Snabba Cash, after watching The Killing, I think they got a sense that I could do different kinds of characters.

Joel Kinnaman

character people thinking

I think the way we look upon gender is that we're realizing that we're not that different, which is a good thing. The United States needs to come further with that. In the Scandinavian countries, we've come further when it comes to gender politics and how we look upon gender and how women are treated in general.

Joel Kinnaman

country way thinking

If we weren't doing remakes, nobody would know who Shakespeare was. I'm not saying that RoboCop is Shakespeare, but it's a way we're retelling. That's what we do as human beings. We retell our favorite stories.

Joel Kinnaman

remakes stories way

I think I'm a boxer, but then when I get hurt, I'll start scrapping.

Joel Kinnaman

boxers hurt thinking

You're not able to do a lot of projects because you don't have a name. I wanted to get my movies to come over that hedge, so that I could do the movies that I wanted to do.

Joel Kinnaman

projects able names

I really want to live in New York. That's the city of my dreams.

Joel Kinnaman

cities new-york dream

You're always trying to look for material that is as challenging as possible, so that's why I like stuff where the characters go through the most difficult times they've ever had in their life. It makes me push myself further and learn more about myself.

Joel Kinnaman

always-trying challenges character

What I enjoy most with acting is when it's a good scene with one or two other actors, and you feel a strong connection and you don't know how you're going to respond, and everybody is listening to each other and getting affected by each other, and even though you've rehearsed it many times, it feels like it's happening right now.

Joel Kinnaman

strong listening two

If you think back to the moments when you've gone through the most pain in your life, or the most severe anxiety, your body is very much involved in that. Your body is expressing those emotions. So, when we, as actors, try to access those feelings, the body is a great tool to use.

Joel Kinnaman

anxiety pain thinking

We don't know why we are here and . . . our role in the universe, and the thought of an infinite universe. It's something the human mind can't really grasp. [And] it's statistically impossible that there's not life on other planets.

Joel Kinnaman

why-we-are-here roles mind

We're all a big hippie family so I got five sisters and a bunch of different mothers. Not really, but my sisters' mothers are all good friends with my mother. We're a big family, 25 people.

Joel Kinnaman

good-friend hippie mother

I believe that this life is all we have. I don't believe in anything after this, so I think the choices we make here are so important and the relationships we choose are crucial, especially in that time when we are developing ourselves and we're becoming adults.