Acting is harder than people realize. It’s not just reading words off of a script when the director yells "action!" It requires a degree of physicality and emotional intelligence that not every profession asks of its workers. Transitioning from one role to another often requires a fairly substantial break, but that’s not what Joel Kinnaman got when going from Suicide Squad to a role in the fourth season of Netflix's House of Cards.
Sitting down with THR, actor Joel Kinnaman explained that the process of going straight from Suicide Squad to House of Cards represented a daunting and draining challenge. Here's why it was so rough:
We were able to work it out... I was promised five weeks in between productions, but then that shrunk to like six days or something so it was really jumping from one to the next. I was a little concerned right when I started out cause I was pretty drained after Suicide Squad and I had done a movie just before that as well so I was coming off of eight months of shooting very intense stuff.
Joel Kinnaman doesn’t just have a minor part in the fourth season of House of Cards. His character Will Conway plays a major role in the narrative of the season – a sharp counterpoint to Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood. Making the role even more difficult is the fact that – as Kinnaman explains in the interview – Will Conway’s advantage against Frank Underwood is his youthful exuberance. To properly embody the character, Kinnaman needed to maintain a sense of energy and liveliness that other characters in the Netflix series don’t necessarily need to keep up.
It obviously doesn’t help that Joel Kinnaman has just come from a physically demanding shoot on David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. As Rick Flagg – commander of the titular team of super villains – the role required Joel Kinnaman to be in top physical form and partake in a great deal of stunt work. Even a minor role in a bombastic action film requires a little bit of rest before taking on another long term project, and Kinnaman didn’t get what was planned much less the time most actors get off after a role like that.
That being said, Joel Kinnaman would go on to admit that the high quality of a series like House of Cards managed to not only keep him going, but reinvigorate his drive to produce solid work:
When I came into House of Cards; it was just the writing was so good. It just fits well into your mouth and it's so fun to rehearse it. It was one of those things where it didn't take any energy working on it I actually got energy from digging into the material.
In the end all of the hard work seems to have paid off. The internet has consistently praised the fourth season of House of Cards, and early glimpses of Suicide Squad seem nothing short of amazing. We will just have to wait and see where Joel Kinnaman takes the character of Will Conway during House of Cards Season 5.
