It's been a quick leap to leading-man status for the 29-year-old actor from Sydney, but one he says he always saw coming. In early May, during a break from shooting David Ayer's comic book supergroup thriller Suicide Squad, in which he plays Captain Boomerang, Courtney says he just decided it was all going to work out. As he tells his pal, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who helped to break Courtney by giving him a part as the villain across from Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher (2012), he didn't have a dream to be on the stage—the stage was always wherever he happened to be standing.


CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE: Mr. Courtney, how are you, my friend?

JAI COURTNEY: All the better for hearing your sweet tone. 

McQUARRIE: Where are you?

COURTNEY: I'm doing Suicide Squad in Toronto. We're here till the end of August. The character I'm playing is a straight piece of shit, so I've just been channeling that.

McQUARRIE: [laughs] You always seem to take a particularly perverse delight out of playing miscreant characters.

COURTNEY: [laughs] Yeah, well, I just like to stretch myself.

McQUARRIE: Have you seen Terminator yet?

COURTNEY: No. But I've heard good things. And I have high hopes. 

McQUARRIE: Well, because of our mutual associations, I have some insider information, and, off the record, I'm hearing it's great. And on the record, I'm glad I'm not coming out anywhere near your movie.

COURTNEY: [laughs] What's going on with yours

McQUARRIE: Which was very generous of you. Also Unbroken was fantastic. And now you're doing Suicide Squad and Terminator. And when do I see Felony?

COURTNEY: Felony is out there. I don't know who to blame for its vanishing act, but it came and went and was on about three fucking screens in the States. It deserved to be seen for Joel [Edgerton]'s writing efforts, and his performance is phenomenal. I was proud of my work. I think the tone of the piece is really cool, and it was one of the best scripts I ever read, so it was a shame that it didn't get the attention that I think it deserved. But you can find it on iTunes.

McQUARRIE: I'll go on iTunes right after I hang up the phone. In fact, I'm going to hang up now. Lets just wrap this up. [laughs] What's next for you? 

COURTNEY: Well, at the end of this year, I go home and do some theater, which I'm pumped about and haven't done for some time. I've been chatting with a friend of mine, Mel Cantwell, for years about mounting a production of Of Mice and Men with her theater company. We knew each other when I studied at drama school, and we talked about it back then—in, like, '05, '06. I was focusing my energy and time on getting a film career happening, but I made the choice last year to set the time aside to do it. It will be a total change of pace and a real departure from this craziness. And then, we'll see, man. We'll see how Terminator goes. The talk is that next year we'll go back-to-back on the next two. If that happens, there's not really a lot of time to look at stuff.

McQUARRIE: No. Your life is no longer your own. And what about Divergent?  

COURTNEY: I'm done. I died in the second one. Spoiler alert! But I've died in a film of yours before, and I'm still under the assumption that that wasn't necessarily the end for that character. You're making another one of them, right?

Read the full interview here

Source: Interview Magazine