‘For All Mankind’ Star Joel Kinnaman and Creators Unpack [SPOILER]’s Death and Why It Was ‘the Hardest Ending to Craft’

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains major spoilers from “Home,” the third episode “For All Mankind” Season 5, now streaming on Apple TV.

There’s a poignant irony that on the same day the Artemis II is set to return to Earth after being the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century, Apple TV’s “For All Mankind,” the series that has spent five seasons dreaming up what could have happened if we never stopped exploring the cosmos, finally said goodbye to its original space cowboy.

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Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), the pioneering astronaut who fought like hell to get America to the moon after it was beaten by the Soviets only to help colonize Mars 30 years later, met his end in the third episode of Season 5, appropriately titled “Home.” Apple couldn’t have paid for more perfect timing and goodwill space marketing off the Artemis II mission, as the overlapping narratives have inspired fans to champion the fictional, hopeful story at the center of “For All Mankind.”

“I think it’s beautiful,” Kinnaman tells Variety. “There’s something with this show that I absolutely revere, and I think others do too, in that it had the courage to have optimism, and to aspire to our better angels.”

That’s how Kinnaman looks at Artemis’ real-life leap for exploration and the associated hope for further space missions as well. But at the same time, he can’t help reflecting on his eight years living among the stars — as created by Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi and Ronald D. Moore’s revisionist history — where the 1960s space race never ended. At the forefront of their mission has always been Ed, the cocky, boisterous and resolute leading man who risked his life at every turn to earn Americans past, present and future the bragging rights that they led the charge into the final frontier.

In the end, it wasn’t being trapped on the moon, or later on Mars, or even the bureaucratic red tape that sent him into a frenzy at least once a season that felled the great Ed Baldwin. It was time, age and his body that planted the white flag. Across the first two episodes of the season, his doctor pleaded with him to take it easy after being diagnosed with an aggressive illness. But did that stop Ed from rallying the Sons and Daughters of Mars to help jail break their friend Lee Jung-Gil (C.S. Lee) after he was charged with the planet’s first murder? No, it didn’t —but the rescue mission took a toll on Ed, and his body never fully recovered. After sharing a few moments with his daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and his grandson Alex (Sean Kaufman), including a lovely scene where they threw back shots while listening to Ed’s wedding song “Love Me Tender,” he dies quietly in his bed at the end of Episode 3.

Kinnaman was among the first cast in the series, and its creators admit he was a big part of why it got greenlit as one of Apple TV’s inaugural lineup when the platform launched in 2019. So killing off their leading actor, even if the character had aged into his 80s by Season 5, was a crucial bit to get right.

“Ed, I have to say — as indestructible as he’s been on the show and as a character, and how central he’s been to everything — was the hardest ending to craft,” Nedivi says. “The more we thought about this season and the new generation coming in with his grandson, it felt like the motivation was there to do this handoff while also helping to inform Alex’s story and really everything that comes next. We always approach it from a place of asking if there is more story to tell with the character and what is best for the overall show. This was the first time where that answer felt like it was the perfect time to say goodbye to Ed, as painful as that was for us.”

His final day of filming had an added intensity for Kinnaman, whose last scene was the deathbed memory of his younger years, in the infancy of the space program, where he is reunited with his best friend Gordo (Michael Dorman) and his wife Karen (Shantel VanSanten), both of whom died seasons ago but returned for the scene. By the nature of the show, Kinnaman has said goodbye to most of his original co-stars already, many of whom perished in various space missions and terrorist bombings over its decades-long span. But his final walk as Ed, side by side with Gordo, was emotional.

“I was a total mess,” Kinnaman says. “It was such a chaotic last day of the show. I was shooting with Michael, and I was so moved by seeing him because he’s become such a dear friend of mine. The memories all came back, and then I was saying goodbye and giving a little speech to the crew, and just crying my eyes out. We finished around 1 in the morning, and then I was driving home completely filled up with this emotion. But at my house, I had six friends from Sweden champing at the bit, together with my wife, because they’re waiting for me to show up. We all got into three large vehicles to charge up the coast to go to Burning Man, where my wife and I got married.”

Season 5 of “For All Mankind” was filmed in 2024, but Kinnaman says he’s still unpacking the emotional milestones crammed into that weekend — and he’s proud of the story beats they managed to pay off with Ed’s final episode. The first was the episode’s flashbacks to his much-discussed-but-never-seen time as a soldier behind enemy lines in Korea. Kinnaman, Nedivi and Wolpert had talked for years about exploring that part of Ed’s service, which resulted in him nearly being captured and killed. But it was now or never to show those terrifying moments fleeing on foot while wounded, and they stand in stark contrast to the quieter final moments of 81-year-old Ed finding peace in his final hours.

“I remember in the writers’ room saying that if there ever was a right time, now is it because it is fitting,” Nedivi says. “What happens a lot to our family members and people as they get closer to the end, it’s those past memories that come flooding in, so it felt natural. The way you see these flashbacks happen, it’s not just random flashbacks. These are memories that he’s reliving in the moment as he’s going through this and they inform him in the present.”

Breaking the dam of his past trauma also allows in the memories of Gordo, Karen and their son Shane, all of whom welcome him into that proverbial light in the episode’s final sequence. Of them all, Wolpert says Shane is the most affecting, because Ed is picturing him around the same age he died tragically, so he’s reuniting with these perfect versions of those closest to him.

“The amount of loss that Ed has been through in his life is staggering, so to bring that back into the fold — and not say that this was heaven or that they’re waiting or anything — but to give him that memory of them and that first space flight was important,” Wolpert says. “It was like his first Gemini space flight that he went on. It was the beginning of everything for him. Having them there to witness that, and on a metaphorical level, set him off from here just felt like the right way to bring it all back to the beginning.”

While Ed is often held up as a hero among fans and within the series’ alternative history, he was never an easy character. He rebuked authority at every turn, risked multiple missions on a hunch that he knew better and dodged death on multiple planets. He was a complicated, sometimes ornery guy, and Kinnaman thinks they captured those multitudes in his death. 

“I think they kind of imbue all of those heroic qualities in him there at the end, but he’s also a selfish bastard with a massive ego,” he says. “Some of his most heroic moments have definitely been just about his own ego. But he was always ready for a moment of self-sacrifice. He’s always gonna help a friend. I love that, in his final act, they really were able to capture the whole essence of Ed.”

Before Season 5 premiered, Apple ordered a sixth and final season of the series, which is about to start production. In that final stretch, which will bring the storyline to the present day, could the death of the mighty Ed foreshadow similar fates for the last two surviving original characters –– currently incarcerated Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) and Earth-bound retiree Danielle (Krys Marshall)?

“There’s no avoiding death,” Wolpert says. “But I think it was also important to us early on that we established that not everybody has to die to leave the show. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that by the end of our run, we will have killed off all the OGs.”

“We’re bloodthirsty, but we’re not that bloodthirsty,” Nedivi jumps in to add.

For whatever comes next, Kinnaman doesn’t want to know about it. “I asked to not get sent any scripts past my death. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want any links to the show. I just want to watch it with everyone else, because now I get a season and a half of just being a fan.”

It was in the scripts of “For All Mankind” that Kinnaman always found the real heart of the show. Although admittedly biased, he credits the writing as some of the most underrated on TV. He says he rarely came to the creators with comments about Ed’s choices, and he didn’t even have any final requests for his character — but he did plead for one thing that has yet to make its way on the show.

“I was always like, ‘Where are the fucking aliens?’” Kinnaman says. “I kept showing them videos. I was like, ‘This is happening!’ They were always like, ‘Oh, we’re too grounded for that.’ But I want some aliens!”