Jai Courtney Prepares For ‘Suicide Squad’

Jai Courtney will be coming out swinging as Boomerang in the film “Suicide Squad!”

The actor told Access Hollywood‘s Liz Hernandez that he’s looking forward to meeting his co-stars, including Will Smith and Jared Leto, soon.

“Everyone’s been in training, but we’re yet to kind of all converge and get down, but that’s happening this week,” he said at the junket for his new film, “The Divergent Series: Insurgent,” on Friday. “I can’t wait. It’s really cool. It’s going to be [as] big as you can imagine and, you know, it’s a really interesting world.”

PHOTOS: Meet Warner Bros’ Movie ‘Suicide Squad’

Jai said he anticipates there will be friendly competition on the “Suicide Squad” set to meet the expectations of director David Ayer.

“It does attract a certain amount of talent and dedication and [David] really demands that,” he said. “I mean, I’d heard a lot about what he put the guys through on ‘Fury’ in order to prepare for that film and it fascinated me. I mean, you don’t always get that. That’s such a privilege as an actor when you are presented with a challenge and expected to really bring it and match and kind of come along. I think the group he’s assembled, there’s probably going to be a really healthy amount of competition between us. You know, not just to do it like the macho elements of like getting in shape and stuff….And you bring out the best in one another when you demand that of each other.”

PHOTOS: ‘The Divergent Series: Insurgent’ Character Posters

Jai has a lot on his plate. In addition to “Suicide Squad” – which is due to be released on August 5, 2016 – he’ll be flexing his acting muscles with Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Terminator Genisys” – in theaters July 1 – and he’ll be reprising his role of Eric in the second film in the “Divergent” series, “Insurgent.”

He explained how the “Divergent” sequel expanded the story and dug deeper into the characters.

“Robert Schwentke, our director, who, you know, had such a refreshing kind of approach to this,” Jai said. “It was like he wanted to keep everything we’d established in ‘Divergent’ with the roots of those characters and the kind of the tone, but really kind of expand things and go there with it, you know. I think there was an immense amount of freedom in kind of coming back to these characters in that we knew who they were now. “

Jai admitted that he was initially nervous about jumping back into character as Eric, but quickly realized he was still familiar with the role.

WATCH: Shailene Woodley: ‘Insurgent’ A ‘Much Bigger’ Movie

“I guess my anxieties about kind of forgetting [Eric] were put to rest because it is such a muscle memory thing where you just step on [set] and it’s like, ‘OK. You know, you’re in costume, you’re in character and it’s like here we are again in this kind of world,'” he said. “Robert gave us the kind of choice to really explore layers that we perhaps hadn’t been able to in establishing things. You know, it’s like now we know where we are, so let’s see how we can make that more interesting by building upon it.”

“The Divergent Series: Insurgent” hits theaters on March 20.

Paige Feigenbaum

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