“We had some real, underlying issues”: Joel and Kelly on the realities of a very modern, Hollywood romance

Joel Kinnaman and Kelly Gale are lying on a small patch of beach two hours north of Stockholm, kissing. It is a moment so intimate, it appears they have forgotten the 10 or so onlookers and the snap of photographer Ellen von Unwerth’s camera. “I almost feel embarrassed to watch,” remarks our fashion assistant. One bystander, however, is unbothered; Zoe, Joel and Kelly’s rescue dog, saunters into the scene and plops down on the beach directly between the couple and the camera, her wagging black tail whomping Kelly in the face.

On the drive home from the Kinnaman’s summer property, a vast plot of seaside land with several structures and enough beds to house an expanding family, the entire Vogue Scandinavia team will remark on the magic of this couple. So wildly attractive, so unabashedly in love and so prepared to embark on their next chapter – marriage, children, further career milestones.

“Are we going to tell the real story?” Kelly asks Joel with a grin when I inquire about their engagement, announced via Instagram early last year. A couple of weeks have passed since our cover shoot at the country house when Joel, Kelly and I meet for lunch in a private suite at Stockholm’s Diplomat Hotel. During the five or so minutes that we wait to be let up, Joel receives a hello and a fist-bump from an acquaintance in the lobby - proof that though he now lives in Malibu, he will always be a Stockholm boy.

We enter the suite and the 42-year-old actor places his Acne Studios shopping bag by the door (“Kelly got a jacket”) and we settle in around the dining room table. It began, as many modern romances do, with a DM. “It went down in the DMs,” Joel sings, referencing the 2016 Yo Gotti hit. It was not a move that typically worked on the 27-year-old who, as a Victoria’s Secret model, was accustomed to receiving messages from well-known bachelors. “Usually I would go in and see that the guy follows all of the Victoria’s Secret models,” she says. “But I went on his profile and he was only following me and, like, 100 people.” The only person they had in common was Barack Obama. “I passed the first test,” says Joel, proudly.

Seven months later, after one failed attempt to get her to join him at a UFC fight in New York, Joel managed to take Kelly on a sushi date in Los Angeles... sort of. “It was a little bit weird, because I had been trying to get out of my current relationship for a while,” Kelly says. It was an on-again-off-again situation with a guy she had been with since high school. So she assured herself that it wasn’t a date, that they were just “two people meeting up.” They didn’t even hug, but the chemistry was there.

The second meet-up was a hike in Malibu. “And then I got a hug,” says Joel, before quickly correcting himself. “Well...I didn’t get a hug, I gave her a hug.” Kelly interjects, “You tried to kiss me.” Joel was all in – he had already brought up the notion of having kids. When Kelly returned to New York, she officially called things off with her boyfriend.

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Both Kelly and Joel came to be born in Sweden via unusual circumstances. Kelly’s mother was born in India and adopted by a Swedish family as a child. She met Kelly’s father, an Australian, while travelling in Thailand and returned with him to Gothenburg to start their family. “I honestly haven’t spent that much of my life here because we lived in Ghana for several years of my childhood,” Kelly explains. At 12, she was spotted by a model scout and shortly thereafter she was travelling the world. She walked her first Victoria’s Secret runway in 2013.

As for Joel, his American father, Steve Kinnaman, was drafted into the military during the Vietnam war. While stationed in Bangkok, befriending Europeans for the very first time and even attending the wedding of a half-Vietnamese bride, he couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that things didn’t “seem right.” When Steve received his orders to be shipped into combat, he decided he “wasn’t going to participate in the war.”

He burned his passport and went on the run, eventually escaping to Sweden and applying for political asylum. “And then he met my mum and they started a family,” Joel says. Today Steve and Bitte Kinnaman live full-time at the family summer house. On the day of our cover shoot, they warmly greeted our team, even offering up bathing suits to borrow in case anyone wanted to take a swim after we wrapped.

A knock at the door indicates lunch has arrived. Steamed white fish and veggies for both Joel and Kelly. “He’s on my Victoria’s Secret diet right now,” says Kelly, a self-described foodie and armchair nutritionist. Joel is preparing for a role that requires him to shed all his hard-earned muscles. I ask him how it’s going. “Oh, it’s miserable,” he says. “Luckily he never saw me get ready for the Victoria’s Secret show, or we would not have been a couple,” says Kelly.

Kelly was a “completely different person from now” on her first non-date with Joel. Gregarious and easy-going by nature, Joel loosened her up – taught her to enjoy life more. Brought out her goofy side. “I think it was her competitiveness and her professionalism that was getting in the way of everything,” he says, turning to Kelly. “You kind of realised that maybe you didn’t want to sacrifice everything for your career. It was sort of like...it’s not all going to fall apart if you have a little bit of this or try doing that. If you don’t allow yourself to try different things and see what you like and don’t like, what’s it all for?”

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Kelly had gone from a “strict” household (her word) to a strict career. “It was very much ‘this is right and this is wrong’,” she explains. When she began pursuing modelling, the people around her were not entirely supportive, suggesting that she would fail or turn to drugs. Her competitive nature drove her to prove them dead wrong, to “never do a drug” and “never drink.”

As she describes it, she set up strict rules and boundaries for herself, so she could succeed in the competitive modelling landscape while protecting her mental and physical health. But then came Joel, who operates in shades of grey – open to experiences and various ways of seeing things. A no-bullshit, heart on his sleeve kind of guy (his mum is a therapist). It was refreshing and unexpected. “I was never gonna end up with some one with tattoos,” she says. Now she wants one herself – a homage to the couple’s two rescue dogs.

Joel is no stranger to a career-oriented physical transformation, current diet inclusive. He’s gone big and buff as Rick Flag in Suicide Squad and Takeshi Kovacs in Altered Carbon and gaunt and pale as a tweaker-turned-detective in The Killing. For Joel, discovering acting was somewhat of a revelation. “I didn’t grow up thinking I was going to amount to much and I wasn’t really good at anything,” he says.

“It felt like all of a sudden, life had meaning in a way and it was a purpose and a goal. So when I started doing my first characters, I was prepared to be very self-destructive to get to where I needed to be.” Fulfilling the old school perception of the tortured artist, Joel was ready and willing to “embrace the darkness” if that’s what was called for.

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These days he approaches things differently, drawing from personal experience without spiralling into depression or bouts of anxiety. “If I’m playing someone that’s an alcoholic, I don’t have to go on a six-week bender,” he says. When I ask if he’s referring to a specific role, he admits that he’s “dabbled in stuff that has been connected to a character,” mentioning The Killing specifically. “But wasn’t he, like, a meth addict?” I ask. “Yes,” he responds. Next up, Joel will play a revenge-seeking father in the John Woo-directed Silent Night. Presumably, no revenge was taken in preparation.

Lately Kelly has caught the acting bug as well. She had done theatre as a kid, but when modelling “took over” she abandoned the idea of acting, even as major self-tape requests came rolling in. She was asked to tape for Zendaya’s role in Dune, but she didn’t get around to it because she “didn’t want to send in a half ass tape or do a shitty job.” The audition request, however, coupled with the lack of model-related travelling during the pandemic, spurred her to dive into acting with signature dedication, working with a coach and self-taping obsessively.

“It’s a lot of work though, for me,” says Joel. “I’m captain self-tape at this point.” Kelly interjects, “He wants to direct, so it’s perfect.” The long hours have paid off – Kelly stars in forthcoming action film The Plane opposite Gerard Butler as well as a Netflix film, Uglies. “Now I’m prepared and ready to audition for Dune 2 instead,” she adds.

With their careers and relationship thriving, there was only one thing left to do: get engaged. Judging by their celebratory Instagram posts, the charming proposal anecdote recounted by Joel on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and that big, beautiful ring, it looked from the outside like the engagement played out like a fairytale (save for the fact that they nearly got arrested for hiking on private property in Hawaii). But here it comes – the aforementioned “real story”.

“I had said to Joel three weeks earlier that I am not ready to get married,” says Kelly. She had been saying it for months, in fact, repeatedly. She had told her friends and family that she was not ready for an engagement. She said that if Joel were to ask for their blessing or for assistance picking out a ring, that they were to stop him. She wanted to get engaged, just maybe “six months later.” Joel figured she didn’t really mean it. “Well, you don’t decide when I propose,” he told her.

Kelly’s response? “Well, you don’t decide the answer.” In January 2021, without consulting anyone, Joel bought a ring and planned the cinematic sunrise proposal. “I said yes, but I was kind of pissed,” Kelly says, adding, “It would have been so awkward if I had said no.”

After the engagement, Kelly felt “confused.” “I started Googling ‘sad after engagement’,” she says (as it turns out, it’s “a thing”). Given that she’s a moderate-sharer on Instagram, she felt obligated to post some thing romantic to commemorate the moment. “Yours forever,” she wrote beneath a selfie of her and Joel kissing, the ring centre stage. Now the whole world thought they were happily engaged, but things at home were still “weird”. “We had some real, underlying issues,” Joel now admits. “Like, foundational issues in our relationship that we hadn’t solved.”

He knew things weren’t perfect – what relationship is? – but he saw the engagement as a “doubling down.” The sort of guy to face things head on, Joel figured once they got engaged, all of the “heavy shit” between them would work itself out. “For me, it was like, I want this relationship to work. I want Kelly, I love her,” he says. Ever the pragmatist, Kelly wanted to solve their problems first, before committing to spending the rest of their lives together. She stopped wearing the ring.

In hindsight, she credits the mistimed engagement to her and Joel working through their “shit”. The mistimed engagement, and therapy. Or rather, a coach, named Mark. “We f ***ing love this guy,” says Joel. “Everyone deserves a Mark in their life.” They saw him “once or twice a week for almost a month,” working through their “deeper shit”. Building a foundation. “It was really brutal and painful, but then we got through it and it was like...” Joel mimes his brain exploding. “It felt like our relationship really started,” says Kelly. They agree that now, three years after they first went for sushi, they are in their honeymoon phase. Today she’s wearing her ring.

These days they still see Mark, though less regularly. They have the confidence to get through the tough parts – to weather the sometimes-chaos of a full life spent together. “Mark asked us if we play tennis, which we do,” says Joel. “He taught us that in a relationship, you’re always playing doubles, on the same team.” “Now I want to get married,” says Kelly. She turns to Joel and says, sweetly, “I love you so much.”