Joel Kinnaman scared “Silent Night” director John Woo with his driving
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The actor plays a vengeance-seeking vigilante in the first Hollywood film from the legendary director in 20 years.
Legendary director John Woo recently revealed to EW that Joel Kinnaman scared the filmmaker half to death taking him for a drive while the pair were making their action-revenge movie Silent Night. Woo recalled that The Suicide Squad actor "asked me to drive with him, to sit with him. I was so scared."
When EW catches up with Kinnaman, the actor admits that he may have given the director of such action classics as 1992's Hard Boiled and 1997's Face/Off a little too much action in real life.
"The driving part was really fun on this film," he says. "I got to really do a deep dive. They taught me how to drift and things like that. And then we put John in the car and had a little spin! It was so fun." Well, fun for Kinnaman, anyway. "That was a one-time deal," the actor admits. "John jumped in and out real quick."
Silent Night (in theaters this Friday) is the first Hollywood movie from Woo since 2003's Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck. Kinnaman stars as Brian Godlock, an ordinary citizen driven to hunt down and kill the gang members responsible for the death of his son on Christmas Eve. The actor describes the film as a classic revenge story. "He also gets shot and almost killed, but it destroys his voice box, and he becomes mute," the star explains.
Shattered by the death of his child, and unable to connect with his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno), Brian becomes consumed with making these people pay by turning his body into a killing machine. Gun play, hand-to-hand-combat, and extreme driving are some of the skills audiences see honed via montage.
"It was a big box check for me, to get a real proper montage," the actor says with glee. "I'm always training, but, leading up to a film like this, especially when I get a montage, you turn it up. And, if you have a shirtless scene, you've got to eat salad and stuff."
Carlos Latapi/Lionsgate
Joel Kinnaman in 'Silent Night'In the film's most memorable action set piece, presented as a one-shot sequence, Kinnaman's vigilante taking out a seemingly endless stream of opponents as he advances up the stairs of a warehouse. The actor explains, "It t took us several days to rehearse that. We were also shooting in Mexico City. It’s at elevation, so running up those stairs was pretty gnarly. The location was a little scary. I stepped out, and I was like, oh, that’s a 60-foot drop, we should probably have a little tape there warning people. The mantra that was going through my mind the whole film was 'no permanent injuries.'"
These are busy times for Kinnaman. The actor can currently be seen in season 4 of the Apple TV+ science-fiction show For All Mankind, and the Swede recently costarred with Woo's Face/Off star Nicolas Cage in the car-set horror-thriller Sympathy for the Devil.
"It was pretty epic," Kinnaman says of working Cage. "I mean, Nick is just as advertised. The first day we’re rehearsing, [I] show up at his house, and he slams the door open. He's got pink hair and he's like, 'Hi, man! F---! My wild cat just ran away!' Then, in his whole living room, there’s this big birdcage. He walks up to the cage, and he’s like, 'Here’s Miles, He’s my reptile manager.' There’s this big guy standing in there who is apparently his reptile manager!"
Next, Kinnaman will star in another automobile-oriented film called The Beast. "It’s me and Sam Jackson in a car," he says, laughing. "It’s a new genre. It’s me and an OG in a car."
Silent Night costars Scott Mescudi (a.k.a. Kid Cudi) and Harold Torres, and is written by Robert Archer Lynn. The film is released in theaters Dec. 1 ahead of a Dec. 19 release on VOD.
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