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‘Suicide Squad’s’ Jai Courtney Self-Harmed, Took Mushrooms To Prepare For Captain Boomerang

By Gregory Wakeman
Published on: 14:54 PST, Jul 28, 2016

Suicide Squad is being touted as one of the most outrageous and colorful mainstream blockbusters of recent memory. Which is unsurprising considering that it features DC’s most iconic villains joining together to try and save the world.

It’s already been well documented that Jared Leto prepared for the role by sending his co-stars increasingly disgusting presents. But now his fellow Suicide Squader Jai Courtney, who is playing Captain Boomerang in the blockbuster, has revealed that his approach to his role was just as perturbed.

While speaking to Empire, via Yahoo Movies UK, the Australian actor admitted that during a Skype phone call with director David Ayer not only did he decide to put out cigarettes on his arm in order to prove himself capable of taking on the role, but he was also high on drugs at the same time, too.

“That night I happened to eat some mushrooms and I did self-inflict some burns,” the actor explained to the publication. During the same interview, Courtney also admitted that it was Ayer’s suggestion that his facial hair and bouffant be in this particular style.

“I turned up to discuss my look, expecting we’d have a long discussion and slowly he refine it,” Courtney explained. “David [Ayer] just walked right in, picked up some clippers and started shearing chunks of hair off my head. Eventually, he said, ‘You look like bad news.’ Then he left’.”

But that wasn’t just it, because there were other further rather disgusting revelations that emerged from the set courtesy of the cast. Joel Kinnaman, who is playing Rick Flag in Suicide Squad, also revealed that his preparation for the role involve him watching military videos that he described poetically as “horrific s***.”

While Adewale Akkinnuoye-Agbaje listened to tapes of Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal that in 1981 killed, raped and then ate the body of 25-year-old Renee Hartevelt over the course of two days, while his prosthetic make up was applied.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that we’ve heard such stories from the set of Suicide Squad. Back in February, Viola Davis spoke to Vanity Fair about the “horrific gifts” that Jared Leto gave to each of them as he remained in character throughout the shoot.

“The Joker. He did some bad things, Jared Leto,” Davis explained. “He have some really horrific gifts. He had a henchman who would come into the rehearsal room. The henchman came in with a dead pig. And plopped it on the table. And then he walked out.”

“An that was our introduction to Jared Leto. Now I’m terrified, thinking, ‘Is he crazy?’ But the second thought was, ‘Oh shit, I got to have my stuff together.’ You talk about commitment, and then he sends Margot Robbie a black rat. Still alive. In a box. She screamed. And then she kept it.”

Recently, Cara Delevingne, who plays the Echantress in Suicide Squad, also revealed that she took a rather unique approach to getting into character, too. After speaking to David Ayer about the role, even before he’d started to write the script, the filmmaker told Delevingne that she should strip and walk through the woods in the nude. And that’s exactly what she ended up doing.

“There still wasn’t a script, but David asked me to go and try and find a forest and, if it was a full moon, get naked and walk through the woods with my feet in the mud, which I did,” she told W Magazine. “There wasn’t a full moon, but I howled like a wolf. It would have been really funny if someone had seen me.”

[Images via Warner Bros]

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