In a gripping show about grief, murder and our utter inability to know anyone else, Joel Kinnaman provides a much-needed shot of sexual energy. His Detective Stephen Holder has a slithery charm — all shifty eyes and defiant slouch, a far cry from the barrel-chested, middle-aged men in Burlington Coat Factory suits we usually see in the homicide office. (As his partner Sarah Linden, played by the marvelous Mireille Enos, sniffs at him: “You dress like Justin Bieber.”)
It’s a sign of just how magnetic Kinnaman’s performance is — and how great and unpredictable “The Killing” is — that for at least two episodes, I actually thought Detective Holder was the perp. Between his temper flares and the sly evasions native to any former undercover narcotics cop, Holder seemed a likely candidate for Man Leading a Double Life. It turns out I was right on that last count– recently, we discovered Holder is in the shaky first year of recovery from meth addiction. As his character evolves into someone more complicated and vulnerable, I feel comfortable nixing him from the suspects list. But there’s a reason I keyed in to him so powerfully: He may not be the show’s killer — but he is likely its breakout star.
Kinnaman is already a celebrity in his native Sweden, where he played the lead in the dazzling drug-runner drama “Snabba Cash,” being remade in America as “Easy Money” (starring Zac Efron in his role). He will soon become familiar to American cinemagoers as well: He has roles in the upcoming Denzel Washington-Ryan Reynolds thriller “Safe House,” the Emile Hirsch alien invasion movie, “The Darkest Hour,” and the David Fincher-directed version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Our brief, 12-minute phone interview was sadly too short to delve into any of that, or his fascinating family life — he is the son of an American man who defected to Sweden while fighting in the Vietnam War, and he has five sisters from different mothers. Instead, we spoke about “The Killing,” his years of teenage hooliganism and what he learned going sober for a month to play Holder.
I’ve been very curious to hear your real speaking voice. I watched one interview with you, and you had a Swedish accent. And then I watched another interview, and you had an American accent.
[laughs] I’m a bit like a chameleon with my accent. I get caught up in that, like when I talk to people who are interviewing me with a Swedish accent I fall into a weird Swedish accent. I did a lot of traveling when I was younger. I went to places where I was speaking a different language than they were, and I tend to simplify my language in those situations. But the way I’m speaking now, this is my actual accent.
You sound, actually, a lot like Holder.
Well, we have different vocabularies. The way he talks he leans my accent in a different direction.
He’s a blue-collar kid who’s grown up in a rough neighborhood that’s diverse and he’s known a lot of different people. He never had a father around. Never had a mother. Raised by his sister, who’s not that many years older than him, pretty much raised himself, grew up on the streets. I imagine that a lot of his friends became criminals, and he was pretty much saved by the choice he made to go into the academy. And then when he got into the academy, those qualities that would be a weakness — that way of talking or relating that defines him as blue-collar kid — becomes his biggest asset as a cop undercover. That’s kind of how I think of Holder. His biggest strength is his biggest weakness.
There have been so many detective shows over the years. I would think one of the challenges is to be enough like a cop that you seem authentic but different enough that it doesn’t seem like a cliché. What were some of the original qualities you wanted to bring to Holder?
Well, his uncop-like demeanor was written into the script. My challenge was to find the suit that fit that frame. He doesn’t think too much before he speaks. He tells it like it is. He’s a good character to play.
On Sunday we learned that your character is six months in recovery for a drug addiction. How does that change the way you play him? What are some of the things you add to the portrayal?
That was part of my portrayal from day one. The audience finds out now. When I was preparing to play that part, that was totally key and central. I went to NA meetings. I went sober myself for a month.
You did? What was that like?
It was difficult. It was uncomfortable, going to nightclubs and not drinking. If you’re used to drinking, which I am on a social level, it’s demanding. It took a lot out of me not to drink for a month. It made me respect people who have done that for years and years.
Are there certain “tells” you left along the way about this — for instance, if we were to watch it again, what would jump out as, “oh, right, yeah, he’s six months sober.”
I have a bunch of old tweaks, but a lot of that is cut out, because they really didn’t want any tells at all. So how I played it is a little bit departed from what you see on the screen. When you go back, then I think you’ll see it — this is a guy who’s a meth addict.
Well, it’s just a fan site. It has some translated magazine covers from Sweden on there. One of the headlines was, “From teenage hooligan to Hollywood star.” Were you a teenage hooligan?
Well, yeah, I was having some troubles in my teens. Coming of age was — there weren’t a lot of gangs in the sense we think of today, but there were football gangs where you’d feel that community and I had spent some time with the football gangs. I was fighting a little bit.
And apparently you spent a year in Texas. Where were you?
Outside Austin, in this town called Del Valle [a tiny town in Central Texas known for having about 300 residents].
You’re kidding. What an odd place to live.
Do you know it? Yeah, it was different. And 45 percent of the students were in gangs. It was a bit of a bummer for my parents, because they sent me there since I was getting into trouble in Sweden. They wanted to get me out of the south side of Stockholm. I was an exchange student and then, yeah, I ended up in Del Valle.
And how did you become an actor?
I have five sisters. My oldest sister is an actress. She introduced it as a profession. I would watch her plays. When I was 21, I traveled and worked for a year, and I had a friend who was an actor. I applied to the National Theater School. I got in immediately, which apparently was a bit unusual. I got a part in a movie. As soon as I started working the scenes, I got really addicted really fast. I focused all my energy on it. I didn’t give myself a backup plan. It was like, shit I actually am good at this. And that was the inspiration.
Hush, mom: Mitch Larsen (Michelle Forbes) is the only character who almost certainly isn't a murder suspect. Maybe.
No, really: Who killed Rosie Larsen?
AMC’s “The Killing” is the most engrossing American mystery series since the first season of “Murder One,” maybe since “Twin Peaks.” But it’s starting to seem like less of a solvable puzzle-box whodunit by the week — assuming, of course, that the recent flurry of new suspects and motives and incriminating histories doesn’t end up amounting to a gigantic, swarming school of red herring.
Last night’s installment, “Vengeance,” was the series’ best directed and acted episode to date. The only thing that stopped it from eclipsing the series’ pilot were a few clunky moments and lines pertaining to Rosie Larsen’s teacher Bennet Ahmed (Brandon Jay McLaren), his mysterious and still unseen Islamic teacher Muhammad, and the issue of anti-Muslim sentiment, which boiled over in Seattle once word leaked out that Bennet was under suspicion. The instant furor seemed credible, especially given how ruthlessly the incumbent mayor has exploited Bennet’s arrest to damage his strongest opponent, councilman Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell). But the Rush Limbaugh-like radio rant and Mitch’s mom’s bigoted lament felt too scripted, and political correctness makes Bennet’s guilt highly unlikely (I doubt he’ll even turn out to have been an accomplice). And surely “The Killing” is too smart to expand this stuff into a “24″-like terrorism story! I bet this entire thread will turn out to have been a distraction meant to help run out the series’ time clock. There were other irritants, too: For instance, from the instant we saw Sarah’s lie-detector stare in episode one, we knew damn well she was never going to leave Seattle to join her boyfriend, so why keep dwelling on it?
That said, the scene where detectives Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman) visited Bennet’s mosque was terrific: sharply observed, dryly funny (the line about the 40 Muhammads at the prayer meeting), and in the end, surprising. And in every other way, this hour was aces, especially visually. More so than any other episode, this one was built around wide shots that showed the characters from head-to-toe, or from the waist up, and that put several key players in the same frame at once — the better to let you observe their posture and gestures as a detective might. And nearly every cut, shot and scene was thrillingly exact: Darren’s speech before the council (how could anyone vote yes to defunding an afterschool program after hearing Billy Campbell’s sorrowful voice?); the detectives poking around in Muhammad’s meat-cutting warehouse; the various silent-with-music montages. These sequences and others had a precision and restraint that recalled great 1970s paranoid thrillers such as “Klute” and “All the President’s Men,” and early Michael Mann films (“Manhunter” especially). And how refreshing it is to see a crime story told with such patience! Most TV dramas have more cuts in a single act than this episode had in its whole running time.
But really, now, AMC: How are we supposed to try to out-guess the writers (as the network is breathlessly urging us to do via gimmicks such as “The Suspect Tracker”) when the series keeps widening the net, and revealing unsettling facts about major characters that were previously withheld from us? So Bennet was almost certainly having an affair with Rosie, and he was studying Islam at the mosque, and he had a shadowy teacher who happens to work in a place with electrical saws and meat hooks and freezers? And Stan (Brent Sexton) was once a mob enforcer, experienced at killing, so the murder might somehow be connected to his past?
It’s all believable, and very well acted — especially the Stan-Bennet scenes at the end of the last episode and the start of this one; they reminded me of those tense sections of “The Sopranos” when Tony would do a bit of tactical calculus in his head, then conclude that someone had to die. But the plotting is starting to worry me. At times it reminds me of the movie version of “The Fugitive,” an entertaining film that nonetheless withheld key facts so as to make it impossible for viewers to guess who killed Richard Kimble’s wife, or why. I hope that’s not where “The Killing” is headed.
Whether it is or isn’t, though, the plotting of the last couple of episodes still makes me think that the show is a very different animal than the P.R. campaign led us to believe — and that I might as well give up doing the weekly “Colonel Mustard in the study with the candlestick” routine, and just surrender and go along for the ride.
But since we’re here, what the hell: Let’s predict.
Because no major network series is going to reveal that a dark-skinned Somali-American Muslim murdered a teenage white girl, Bennet is a no-go except as an accomplice. I bet that in the end he will prove guilty of nothing more than deeply inappropriate behavior with a student. I feel pretty certain that Darren didn’t kill Rosie, either; despite the fact that Billy Campbell has played bad guys and damaged people brilliantly, the “all politicians are possible murderers” card strikes me as one that “The Killing” has too much pride to play. And I think we can rule out Rosie’s mom and dad and probably everyone else in her immediate family, with two possible exceptions: Rosie’s sister Terry Marek (Jamie Anne Allman) and Jamie the campaign manager (Eric Ladin), who has a hot temper, thinks his bosses are idiots, and seems to have few scruples about anything.
One of my editors suggested that Belko Royce was still a strong candidate as prime suspect because the actor who plays him (Brendan Sexton III) was a bit of an indie film up-and-comer in the ’90s; why would “The Killing” hire somebody like that and not have him end up playing a major role? I disagree; Sexton’s a good actor, but not such a big name that he has to be indulged with extra screen time, and besides, “The Killing” just doesn’t strike me as the sort of show where the identity of the murderer hinges on an actor’s past filmography. That said, Belko has seemed quite impulsive and squirrelly of late.
Right now I’m leaning strongly toward Aunt Terry or Kris Echols (Gharrett Patrick Paon) — the former because she seems tightly wound, put-upon, and very resentful of her in-laws, and the latter because he’s got that Method junkie twitch thing, and his character’s last name is the same as Damien Echols, the convicted teenage murderer in the “Paradise Lost” documentaries.
Who’s your prime suspect? And do you think “The Killing” is giving you enough information, and doling it out fairly enough, to allow you to make an informed guess?
It’s impossible to watch the opening moments of AMC’s new series “The Killing“ (Sundays at 9 p.m./8 Central, starting April 3) without thinking of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking “Twin Peaks.” It’s not just the Pacific Northwest setting, perpetually overcast skies and rumbling synth chords that spark a trip down memory lane; it’s the series’ patient way of telling a story. This account of a single murder investigation in Seattle never sprints when it can amble. As adapted, produced and written for the screen by Veena Sud (executive producer of “Cold Case”), it’s a subtle piece of work. It’s quiet, sometimes hushed, as if the filmmakers were superstitious travelers taking a shortcut through a graveyard and being careful not to step on hallowed ground.
The show’s tone is set by its leading character, homicide detective Sarah Linden (Mirielle Enos of “Big Love”). She’s a divorced single mom who’s just accepted an out-of-state job and her boyfriend’s marriage proposal; she meant to leave Seattle and its killings behind, but ended up getting pulled in by one last case, the apparent murder of a high school student named Rosie Larsen. Sarah is a walking rebuke to the spunky-and-talkative female crime-fighters that currently rule TV; her dogged commitment to her job and its devastating effect on her romantic life reminded me of “Prime Suspect” so strongly that I wonder if “The Killing” will make the proposed American remake redundant. As played by Enos, Sarah is a creature of intellect with a powerful moral compass. She’s also spookily quiet, with a placid face and the kind of eyes you don’t dare lie to. She agrees to do preliminary work on the case only because her commanding officer asked her, and because her replacement, a former undercover cop named Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), seems like an immature macho doofus. But in one of many pleasurable reversals, Holder proves different from but potentially equal to Sarah, using his hipster white-boy slang and Alpha Male Dude energy to warm up witnesses chilled by Sarah’s frosty stare.
Although Sarah and Stephen are the show’s anchors, “The Killing” divides its energy almost equally between other, parallel stories. One concerns the effect of the murder on Rosie’s family: her mother, Mitch (Michelle Forbes, so excellent on “True Blood” and NBC’s “Homicide”); her father, Stanley (Brent Sexton), and her younger brothers. This part of the story is agonizing. You know what’s coming because you saw the body before the family did, but the countdown to the revelation is somehow worse because of this — suspenseful rather than merely surprising. It’s all about how Mitch and Stanley will react to the news, and how they’ll disseminate it to their kids, relatives and friends.
The other plotline concentrates on Seattle city councilman Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), who’s running for mayor in a tight race. When the detectives inform Darren that Rosie’s body was found in the back of a Team Richmond campaign van, he and his chief advisor and secret lover Gwen Eaton (Kristin Lehman) instantly interpret the news in political terms. They seem appallingly indifferent to the human tragedy. To them it’s all about poll numbers and media impressions; they have to remind themselves that murder is not an abstraction, and that this crime will have repercussions far beyond election season.
Did Darren have anything to do with Rosie’s death? The way Campbell plays him, it’s impossible to say. He’s affable but cagey, and thus 100 percent believable as a gifted politician.
I’ve liked Campbell ever since he showed a darker side of his talent portraying Jennifer Lopez’s abusive husband in “Enough” and navigating the darker passages of ABC’s domestic drama “Once and Again.” There’s a melancholy tinge to Campbell’s action figure face, along with hints of buried rage. When his “Once and Again” character Rick Sammler was at his most self-pitying and resentful, Campbell communicated an unnerving level of hostility; when other characters read Rick the riot act, he looked as if he was picturing nooses around their necks, or around his own.
All those qualities come to the forefront here. Darren Richmond is a fascinating character, at once warm, charming, expedient and fundamentally unreadable; all this makes him an ideal counterpart (adversary?) to Sarah, a blank slate with a badge. When the two finally have a tense face-to-face confrontation near the end of Sunday’s two-hour pilot, it’s like a poker table showdown between master bluffers. I can’t wait for the moment when Sarah gets this elusive character in an interrogation room and tries to slip inside his head. What will she find there? Pure evil? Or nothing at all?
“The Killing” is a limited run, 13-part series, adapted from a popular Danish show that’s currently being remade in several countries. I haven’t seen the original, so I can’t compare it to this one. But I can say with confidence that this American version feels less like a U.S. broadcast series, or even a homegrown cable show, than an import.
What kind of import, though? Danish filmmakers were hugely influenced by David Lynch, “Twin Peaks” especially. Lynch’s mix of mordant humor, surreal imagery and gruesome violence might have appealed to the Northern European temperament, and that region’s filmmakers showed their appreciation by producing a number of very Lynchian movies and TV series. The most ambitious were probably Lars von Trier’s “The Kingdom” and “The Kingdom Part 2,” which were in turn remade as the short-lived ABC series “Kingdom Hospital.” But “The Killing” is more immediate than any of its forebears — a procedural rooted in physical and emotional specifics. There are suggestions of a world beyond this one; the helicopter shots over jumbled cityscapes and lush countrysides have an otherworldly feel, as if we’re seeing through the eyes of an angel of death, or a vulture. But for the most part it’s an earthbound show, one that’s unusually attentive to tiny details of body language, clothing and decor. The way a person looks at another person is often more important than what he’s saying, and there are moments when you find yourself thinking like a detective, scanning the wide, densely packed frames for hints of where this engrossing drama might go next.
Joel Kinnaman in "The Killing" 
Hush, mom: Mitch Larsen (Michelle Forbes) is the only character who almost certainly isn't a murder suspect. Maybe. 
Mireille Enos, star of AMC's "The Killing."
