Jai Courtney Prepared for 'Suicide Squad' by Getting High AF on Shrooms

Over the course of the Suicide Squad marketing campaign, an assortment of strange details have surfaced about the method acting in the film. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who plays Killer Croc, revealed recently that he listened to tapes of Japanese cannibal Issei Sagawa while getting his prosthetic make-up put on. Jared Leto (who has well and beyond proven himself to be even less tolerable than the Joker himself) sent rat corpses to cast members and made some extremely creepy phone calls to Margot Robbie, just to name a few uncomfortable ploys. Along with the film’s visionary David Ayer, who made his own drastic moves to coax the cast into character, everyone on the team seemed to embrace the method during filming.

For Jai Courtney, who plays Captain Boomerang in the film, the method form reached him in several alternative ways. One of those ways involved taking mushrooms and getting an unexpected Ayer-administered haircut.

“That night I happened to eat some mushrooms,” Courtney tells Empire in its latest issue, “and I did self-inflict some burns.” Boomerang is known as a wildcard and a drunkard, so it seems as though Courtney’s big-screen take on the character may reach darker, even less likable areas. Where Boomerang was simply a theft and a downright jerk before (letting his team mates get killed to see how things would turn out, for example, is a pretty jerky thing to do) it seems as though the dial is being turned up to 11 for the film. Let’s just hope Boomerang’s record of racism doesn’t make it to the big screen, too – or that it’s met with a baseball bat to the face.

To round out the character’s manic personality and less-than-stellar hygiene, though, David Ayer decided to do something more before shooting. “I turned up to discuss my look, expecting wed have a long discussion and slowly refine it,” Courtney says. “David 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.”

To its credit, Suicide Squad looks like it could be an extremely fun film that gives some of DC’s most interesting villains and vigilantes permanent places in their movie universe. High hopes surround performances from cast members like Margot Robbie, who plays the infamous fan-favorite Harley Quinn, stands out alongside Will Smith’s Deadshot. But for Captain Boomerang, who isn’t as familiar to those of us who aren’t die-hards, making his mark evidently takes a little more work.

Suicide Squad hits theaters on August 5.