Joel Kinnaman Quotes

I went to high school in Texas for one year, my senior year. My parents wanted me to get out of Stockholm because I was running with the wrong crew. They wanted me to get back to my roots.

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.

I used to be like "Why are we doing a remake? What are remakes being done for?" But then, we do that all the time in the theater. Retelling stories is what we've done since we were sitting around campfires. It's a part of the human spirit. It doesn't have to be negative to creativity. It can be completely opposite.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We all can relate to people's weaknesses. We might put up a facade that everything is perfect but none of us are. When we see that weakness in somebody else, we understand or give ourselves a little bit of leeway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Excuse me, I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.

There are a lot of wrong reasons to do a remake, but there are some good ones... I think it's human nature, in many ways, to retell our favorite stories. We do it in the theater, all the time. I've seen four different 'Hamlets,' and every one has given me something different.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a lot of neuroscience now raising the question, 'Is all the intelligence in the human body in the brain?', and they're finding out that, no, it's not like that. The body has intelligence itself, and we're much more of an organic creature in that way.

I think I've seen the first 'RoboCop' like 15 or 20 times. I'm like a kid that way.

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.

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

You have a lot more leeway to be contradictory playing a character than most of the scripts have in them. That's how all actors are. We have so many different sides of ourselves and we're so different, in meeting with different people. The audiences relate more to that and find that more believable.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

I always look for good stories and good characters, and if they're placed in a whodunit, then I'm interested.

'The Killing' has a really great combination of qualities: Even though it's very sad and deals with mourning and grief, it's still exciting. It's about real people and it doesn't shy from the painful points of life.

I'm never very good with marks. They're always like, 'You're not on your mark'. I was like, 'Oh, it's that thing you put on the ground? Yeah, I don't pay attention to it.'

I think you're always afraid when you go into like a big superhero movie that it's gonna be kinda just action and you're not gonna be able to just really go to the bottom of the characters.

It's great to get to work with your idols.

I always get sort of an image of what the character is gonna look like and then I kind of go with it.

Everybody is trying to make something real, something with a core of substance, and of course, an exciting action movie with a lot of terrific stuff and fantastic visuals and everything, but at the core of it, it's a movie with substance and something that is going to make people think.

I love Starship Troopers. That's really smart. I think he really could portray fascism in a comedic way. It's funny because both José [Padilha] and [Paul] Verhoeven were accused of being fascists for their movies because they had fascist leads. So, it's not going to have his tone, but there's going to be political satire in it.

It's always the thing when you're shooting out and about with real people and you could get a couple of bogeys like sticking their face in front of the camera, like 'Hey!'

With RoboCop, I couldn't be happier because it's such a quality director.José Padilha is a young master.

I was meeting a lot of directors and reading scripts, and I was like, "Well, I'd love to play this part," but I couldn't.

It's frustrating when you come over here [Hollywood], especially from a position that I was in, in Sweden, where most people know who you are, but then you come here.

I сan't imagine how ROBOCOP could be PG-13.

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.

I miss the Swedish women on the first day of spring cause they all just blossom in the most incredible way.