Joel Kinnaman’s Intense New CIA Thriller Is Dominating Streaming At A Surprising Time

Published Oct 30, 2026, 11:06 AM EDT

Felipe Rangel is a Movie and TV Journalist ScreenRant. He has been writing about movies and TV since 2021. Felipe joined ScreenRant in 2022, working across different teams, covering everything from breaking news to features to reviews and more.

Felipe is a writer who is an avid film and TV fan, with superhero movies and series being his biggest passion. He graduated from college in 2019, having studied Journalism. Before college, he spent a month studying at the Oxford English Centre. His superhero knowledge expands to the comics, with his undergraduate thesis being "Politics Reflected In American Comics."

Sign in to your ScreenRant account

Joel Kinnaman's thriller series is one of the biggest on streaming, and that comes at a surprising time for the recent hit. Kinnaman knows his way around major projects, be they on the big or small screens. The actor has a couple of popular franchises to his name when it comes to the movies Kinnaman has starred in. The Swedish-American famously played the title role in 2014's RoboCop, with Kinnaman also giving life to Rick Flag in two DC movies, David Ayer's Suicide Squad, and the James Gunn sequel, 2021's The Suicide Squad. Kinnaman also returned in Gunn's DC Universe.

The actor played a multiverse variant of Rick Flag in HBO Max's Peacemaker season 2. That said, Kinnaman's biggest roles on TV mostly come from thrillers of varied subgenres. He led the crime thriller series The Killing over four seasons, played an important role in multiple seasons of the Netflix political thriller series House of Cards, having also recently starred in the streamer's detective series Jo Nesbø's Detective Hole. In the sci-fi realm, Kinnaman led both Netflix's Altered Carbon season 1 and Apple TV's For All Mankind. Now, it is through TNT's High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam that the actor is trending.

Kinnaman's High Value Target Is Taking Over HBO Max At The Perfect Time

At the time of writing, High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam is the 5th most popular movie or TV show on HBO Max via the Amazon Channels in the United States, according to data from FlixPatrol. High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam was originally released on TNT on September 13, with its series finale airing on October 4. After that, the thriller series became one of the many new movies and TV shows that arrived on HBO Max in October, with Kinnaman's High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam landing on the streaming service nationwide on October 14.

As its title suggests, High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam focuses on the first interrogation of Saddam Hussein after he was captured in December 2003. Kinnaman plays the CIA agent interrogating Hussein, John Nixon, with the hit thriller series being inspired by the memoir Debriefing the President, which was written by Nixon. Right now, Kinnaman's High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam ranks higher than major movies and TV shows on the HBO Max Top 10 Overall (from Amazon Channels), including the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell R-rated rom-com Anyone but You, DC's Lanterns, Dakota Fanning's Coraline, and more.

What Else Does Kinnaman Have On The Horizon?

High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam's status as one of HBO Max's biggest shows comes at a surprising time for Kinnaman, as the thriller's finale aired at the start of the month, on October 4. The actor now turns his attention to three upcoming projects. On TV, Kinnaman stars in Prime Video's Bishop, where he hunts a serial killer as Detective Bishop Graves, and the Apple TV dramedy series The Husbands, where Kinnaman plays one of the spouses of Juno Temple's Lauren, who does not know who these husbands are. After High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, Kinnaman will also star in the action thriller movie The Beast.