Jai Courtney

Jai Courtney took small Australian film and television roles as a teenager, trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and got his first real attention as the gladiator Varro on Spartacus in 2010. Two years later he was Charlie, the silent enforcer in Jack Reacher, and Hollywood decided it had found a leading man.

What followed is one of the more instructive miscasting runs of the 2010s. He was John McClane's son in A Good Day to Die Hard, Kyle Reese in Terminator Genisys, and Eric Coulter across the Divergent films, three franchise leads in three years, and none of them worked. The problem was never the ability. It was that all three parts asked him to be sincere and heroic, which is the one thing his face does not sell. Courtney is funny, and slightly mean, and best when a film lets him be both.

Captain Boomerang is where that got recognised. Even in the messy 2016 Suicide Squad he is the most alive thing on screen, and the 2021 film finally builds jokes around him. He drew real praise for playing a corrupt debt collector, the antagonist of the independent comedy Buffaloed, in 2019. Since then the good work has been on the margins: a heist crew member in Kaleidoscope, a frontier soldier in American Primeval, a genial monster in the Australian thriller Dangerous Animals. He is a much better character actor than he ever was a leading man, and he seems to know it.