For All Mankind's Joel Kinnaman Is Thrilled To Be 30 Years Older In Season 4

With high-profile roles in "The Suicide Squad," "Altered Carbon," and "Hanna," Joel Kinnaman has largely been earning cheers for his work on screens big and small in recent years. But some might rightfully argue the actor is delivering the best work of his career on a series getting far less attention. That series is Apple TV+'s alt-history space drama "For All Mankind," which opens at the onset of the late-1960s space race, re-imagining its historical implications in the context of the United States not reaching the moon first. Ensuing seasons have so far revisited said story at 10-year intervals, with the series' returning cast aging up along the way for their respective roles.

That includes Kinnaman, who's already aged three decades onscreen playing fictional American astronaut Edward Baldwin on "For All Mankind." For the series' upcoming Season 4, however, Kinnaman claims an even more dramatic transformation is in order as another three decades will have passed since the Season 3 finale. And as the actor told The Ringer, he's excited by the challenges the dramatic time jump will provide. "Playing old is one of the most difficult things you can do as an actor, so it's a super exciting challenge," he said. 

"Makeup and all that comes into play, but I need to do a physical transformation for this, so I'm trying to get as skinny as possible," the actor continued, also joking that his 20-pound weight loss for his role ruined his summer.

As Joel Kinnaman told The Ringer, the passage of time on "For All Mankind" has already been a welcome challenge, but he knows the Season 4 jump will be a whole new deal. "To play someone 30 years older than you are, when that happens in a movie or a show, it's usually one or two scenes," Kinnaman said. "You don't do that for a whole season."

The prospect of playing older for the entirety of Season 4 is particularly intriguing to the actor. In prepping for the change, he reportedly took inspiration from a scientific study claiming humans change so much over a single decade, they essentially become different people despite our internal journeys tending to convince us otherwise. While Edward Baldwin's internal journey will continue to be fraught with drama, Kinnaman goes on to say the physicality of playing older will be a unique challenge. "As the decades go, the physicality of aging becomes a bigger part of the performance," he told The Ringer, noting that the unavoidable aches and pains of aging must be accounted for.

Facial changes are, of course, also part of the equation, with Kinnaman admitting he's not crazy about spending a season's worth of time in the make-up chair. "This aging process that I'm about to do, that's much better suited for film because it's three, four hours in makeup every morning and it's going to be a b**** doing that." Inconvenience aside, it should be fascinating to see Kinnaman tackle such complexities when "For All Mankind" returns for Season 4.