Joel Kinnaman was desperate to work with Nicolas Cage.
The pair share the same agent and recently teamed up for the 2023 movie 'Sympathy for the Devil', with Joel , 44,revealed he had been hounding their agent to find them something to work on together.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: "I’d actually been on the hunt for something to do with Nic. We have the same agent, and I’d been hounding Andrew [Finkelstein] to find something. Most people are fans of Nic, but I also just have this professional fascination with the courage that he has in how he plays his characters. I wrote this speech for the award I presented to him in Saudi Arabia, and I talked about that. We talk a lot about “acting balls,” and Nic’s acting balls are like watermelons. Saudi Arabian TV actually cut that line. They didn’t want me to say that, but I’ve always been really fascinated with his balls.
"In conversation with Nic, he’s not really interested in naturalism and subtlety, which is what everyone goes for. He goes for big choices and insanity, and it’s just so cool to see someone dare to do something different over and over again. When you watch a reel of all of his work, nobody has a reel like that. Nobody. As I said earlier, I’ve gone the opposite way. I’m always going for the more subtle choice. I try to find some way to make a character meld with me and do just enough to tell the story. Sure, I change body language and cadence for characters, but I’m always looking for subtlety. And Nic is not."
And, Joel revealed that working with Nicolas, 59, exceeded all of his expectations.
He said: "So when you work like Nic does, you risk missing here and there, but when you hit on something like he often does, you get these genius characters that go down in history. So he did not disappoint in 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Our first day of rehearsal in Vegas, I knocked on his door, and when he opened it, he had pink hair.... And he was like, 'My wildcat ran away for the third time.' So it just carried on from there.
"I then got a tour of his house, and he was like, 'That’s my reptile manager.' And then we went down to the basement to rehearse for the first time, and he was completely off-book on the entire script. He’d already spent countless hours working on the script to get to a point where he knew it by heart on the first day of rehearsal. So he’s a singular artist, and that’s why I pinched myself when I got to spend a month in a car with him, just soaking up his genius and lunacy."
