What if 15 years from now, a dating service called Soulmates had a scientific method to find your true soul mate? What would you do? Would you take the test and then what? That is what the AMC TV show Soulmates explores in several different ways in an episodic anthology where Malin Akerman plays the lead as Martha. The 42-year old Swedish American actress plays a woman who has had bad luck in love and marriage and decides to take extreme measures to meet her soul mate. The series plays with the idea that we have a soul mate and also with the idea that it can be found by a dating service.

Do you believe in these two ideas?

The soul mate idea is one that I have trouble with. People like to think that you have one soul mate and I don’t believe in that theory. Whether there are soul mates or not, that is another concept and perhaps we have many and maybe there is no such thing. I do believe that in some way our souls and our energy are a continuum and there is that possibility that our souls have been through many lives. Who knows? Maybe, we are just here having a human experience in this lifetime? There could be the possibility that souls have met in the past. I don’t know. I just don’t know that I would dig my nails into that concept of just one soul mate.

Would you take a soul mate test?

At this point where I stand right now, if a soul mate test came out, I would just not take it. I think it would be too much of an influence and what if it is not real? What if it is just a concept? I am not a believer in soul mates. I believe that you meet people along the way, who you get to grow with for a while and sometimes you get to grow with them for a long time. Who knows? It is too intricate to nail it down to just one person.

The show suggests that you can find your one and only soul mate through a test made by a dating service. Talk about your attraction to this as an idea.

It is super interesting and intriguing. Because it is a big conversation that thing of searching for your soul mate in life and I think it is such a brilliant subject matter to build a whole TV-series around. Because that is the big question mark: What are we all searching for in life? Love is the ultimate and when I was presented with this project and they said: ‘Imagine 15 years in the future and there is a test that can tell you who your soul mate is,’ and I thought: ‘oh my God, that would be really interesting to see what that would do to humanity and relationships’. It is almost like you are creating a religion to follow, so I was absolutely intrigued. I love anything that dives into the human psyche and anything that is character-driven. Our episode was really fascinating. I had not even thought as far as what if your soul mate is dead? Then what do you do? You continue on? That is such a crazy concept in my head but so much fun to dive into as a character. I loved it.

Do you believe in dating services? Do you think it is an awkward way to meet or just the way modern love is and the way people connect in modern times?

I am such an old school person. I am coming from a place of no knowledge of it as I never did online dating. But I have friends who have found the love of their life from online dating. In this day and age, it makes sense when you look at where we are at in the world. People are really busy. Sometimes it is hard to meet the right people if you are just going out to a bar for a drink, maybe it is better to narrow it down and get to message them a little back and forth and get to know their personality a bit before you go out and have your first date. I am neither here nor there on the whole concept because some people have really had so much luck with it. The one thing that I think is lost in translation is perhaps that if you have one site where you just swipe due to how somebody looks and I think that is so unfair because I definitely have been in situations where upfront with somebody I might not necessarily have swiped the right way, had I just seen a picture, but whom I have become completely and utterly attracted to because of who they are and how they present themselves and their charisma in real life. I think it is hard but I think online dating is great for people who don’t have the time and then when you meet someone maybe some magical thing will happen. We all have to kiss a few frogs before we meet our prince or princess and this is just a different way of doing it.

In this particular episode that you play a character who has been married three times and has kind of given up on love after the soul mate has passed before they had a chance to share their love. Do you understand why she takes such extreme measures?

I think the straw that broke the camel’s back is when she and Charlie Heaton‘s character end up having this frivolous sexual interaction in the alley and she is just feeling so much shame and feeling like she has just lost the plot coming from a place of just being depressed in life. But I can understand where the character is coming from: The place of feeling like a failure and I feel like she has not had much support from friends and family and I don’t think she has so many people to lean on so having a lonely life and feeling depressed can lead to some rash decision for sure.

What do you think your episode says about love and about manipulating people who believe in love?

I think it says a lot about society in general. It can be portrayed in any facet of life not necessarily love. It is a good example where you go: Alright, you have found some information and have taken it to heart for what it is without questioning it and then all of a sudden you find yourself here and you have this guy who is so sweet and ready to love and to be a possibility but you are shutting it down because of this one thing, which we can say about many societal opinions: this is the way it should be and so this is what I am going to do. I don’t believe in one soul mate because I think there are so many different things you can love in different people and they can bring you joy in so many different ways and I think this episode speaks to that when we, as an audience, watch Martha and Kurt. It is a real struggle in this episode.

You’ve made some interesting career choices with very different projects such as comedies like Couple’s Retreat, serious drama series such as Billions, and sci-fi films such as Watchmen – do you have a plan for your career now that you are a more mature woman and would you say that your choices have changed?

They have for sure. I think the biggest change came when I had my son. I felt like a big can of worms of emotion got opened up that I had never been privy to before and that was readily available to me and that did dictate my choices and that did make me seek out something like Billions because I wanted to dive into something that was a little darker, a little more about family values and to what extent you would go to protect your family. That character really suited me well because I really understand it from a real place of being a mother. I think as life goes on and as you so eloquently put it – you mature, I think your values change a little and for me, it is about the quality of life, and my family is really first. I think a lot of my choices now are made based on how that will affect the chain of our family and how we function as a family and how much travel is involved and how long is the project. I really enjoy choosing indie projects where I am just off for maybe a month or a month and a half or not even and doing something really cool and hopefully as a career choice for my day to day whenever things open up. I am about to do a pilot for CBS which is a comedy and if that goes, I will be here at home and I can take my son to school and pick him up and be a big part of his life, which is so important to me. It is about finding a balance now which was not before I had him. It was more about whatever compelled me and which projects were creatively where I would go and if that was about me going to Africa for 6 weeks, I would definitely go. I was a nomad and I loved it but it is not so much anymore. It is dictated between sort of situational and creative of course – something I feel I can do something with.

How have you been dealing with the Covid-19 situation and do you feel optimistic about the future of your business and cinema in particular?

I am. I am a silver linings kind of girl and I think we are resilient as a race. I think humans figure it out and I know we will come out of this. We came out of the Spanish flu in 1918 a year and a half later, so I think we will continue on. I think that things will shift. I think it will look different on a set especially in the beginning, which might be a good thing. I think one minute something which is positive is that there might not be as much waste on a set and there will not be as much waste of food, because we cannot do the nice buffets any more because of bacteria. And this is nice. So, some positive things will come out of this. I think it will look very different when we go back. I don’t know how and when but I do know that everyone is hard at work trying to figure it out. I think we are resilient and hopefully, we come out more thoughtful in the steps that we take in general.