LATE CITY
EDITION
LATE CITY
EDITION
Volume 633 Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 Page 1 of 3

JOEL KINNAMAN ON RICK FLAGG

This is from denofgeek.com - Interview 1

Joel Kinnaman has been on a hot streak since 2016's Suicide Squad. He's become a stalwart sci-fi action leading man, headlining the Netflix adaptation of Altered Carbon, Amazon Prime's Hanna, and most recently, winning raves as For All Mankind's Edward Baldwin. But all that time, Rick Flag was still hanging around, waiting for Kinnaman to come back. And with James Gunn taking the reins of the new sequel, The Suicide Squad, Kinnaman jumped at the chance to rejoin the Squad.

Playing one of only four returning characters, one would think that Joel Kinnaman would be carrying some benefits and some baggage into The Suicide Squad. As it turns out, that's half right: as Kinnaman tells us in an interview, the camaraderie and chemistry with his returning castmates is there, but any baggage of carrying the first movie's "plot donkey" forward was completely lifted from him by the new director's tone and style.

Q: What was your journey with Rick Flag like between when the first film came out and when this one started shooting?
Kinnaman: It was in this sort of no man's land in a way. The first film was a big financial success, but I think we all agreed that the end result didn't really add up to what we had hoped and set out to do. This went through a couple of other directors that were interested in taking it on. But when James Gunn came on board, it got really real, real quick, and everyone realized what a great opportunity this was.

When I read James' first draft... it just had everything that we always hoped that this franchise would be. It really had a sincere love for the characters, and it found some odd emotional depth in it. But at the same time, it was just really funny and silly. Every page made me laugh.

I felt maybe on the first movie, I was a little bit of a plot donkey. And here, it's a much looser, stranger, funnier version of Rick Flag. The first conversations I had with James were how I didn't really feel like I wanted to be constrained by what I did in the first film. I wanted to go at this almost looking at it as a new character. He was all for that.

Q: What do you see as Rick's core as a character?

Kinnaman: [He's] a guy who, the military is his family, and he grew up without parents. So, he is what he does. Of course, you have to find the pain and the emotional depth of any character that you're going to do. I think over the course of this film... I can't really spoil it too much, but if the military is his family, Rick