Joel Kinnaman has played cops, soldiers, criminals, and a time-traveling astronaut. This Sunday he takes on the most high-stakes role of his career: the real CIA analyst who interrogated Saddam Hussein. High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam premieres September 13 on TNT, and it might be the series that finally makes him a household name in America.
The true story
The eight-episode limited series is based on the real-life account of CIA analyst John Nixon, the first American officer to debrief Saddam Hussein after US forces captured him in December 2003. Kinnaman plays Nixon, with Waleed Zuaiter, known for Baghdad Central, playing the deposed Iraqi leader.
The series was created by Daniel Stiepleman and Jonathan Wakeham, and Kinnaman also serves as an executive producer. He researched the role by reading Nixon’s 2016 memoir Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein and spending time with the former analyst himself before filming.
In interviews, Kinnaman has said the scenes were made easier, and stranger, by Zuaiter’s uncanny resemblance to the real Saddam. He told The Hollywood Reporter about moments on set where the light hit his co-star a certain way and he found himself thinking, “Holy fuck! It’s Saddam!” He even took photos of Zuaiter on set as if the two of them had stepped back into history two decades after the Iraq war.
Why this role fits him
Kinnaman’s career has been building toward exactly this kind of part. Swedish audiences knew him first from Snabba Cash (Easy Money), and American viewers met him as Detective Stephen Holder on AMC’s The Killing, a performance that remains one of the great character turns in modern TV crime drama. Then came House of Cards, RoboCop, Suicide Squad, Altered Carbon, and four seasons of Apple TV’s For All Mankind as astronaut Ed Baldwin.
What connects those roles is a specific Kinnaman quality: controlled intensity. He plays men who are holding something back, whether it is grief, rage, or doubt. An interrogation drama built around a CIA analyst trying to crack the most guarded man on earth is practically custom-made for him.
The four roles that built him
If you only know Kinnaman from the blockbusters, the back catalogue is worth the trip. As Stephen Holder on The Killing, he turned a streetwise ex-narcotics detective into one of TV’s most quoted characters. As Rick Flag in Suicide Squad, he was the straight man holding together a cast of glorious lunatics. As Takeshi Kovacs in Altered Carbon‘s first season, he carried a dense cyberpunk noir almost entirely on charisma. And as Ed Baldwin in For All Mankind, he aged across decades of alternate space-race history with a slow-burn dignity that became the emotional spine of the show. High Value Target asks him to do all of that at once, in an interrogation room.
The ensemble around him
High Value Target surrounds its two leads with a deep bench: Tom Berenger, Christopher McDonald, Talia Balsam, Dar Salim, Matt Barr, Lena Góra, Rebecca Night, Ewan Miller, and Paul Ryan. The production comes from AR Content and Big Dreams Entertainment.
The real Nixon story
The source material is stranger than most fiction. After Saddam’s capture in December 2003, the CIA needed someone to figure out who they actually had in custody, and Nixon, an analyst who had studied the dictator for years, became the first American to interrogate him at length. His memoir Debriefing the President argues that Washington fundamentally misunderstood Saddam, and the series promises to bring that contrarian take to the screen. Kinnaman playing a bookish analyst rather than a soldier is part of the point: this is a thriller about talking, not shooting.
The political thriller space is crowded, but this one has two advantages: a true story with genuine historical weight, and a lead actor who has been quietly excellent for fifteen years without ever getting the single defining role his talent deserves. If the series lands, that changes this month.
