Why Kyle Reese From Terminator Genisys Looks So Familiar
"Why does Kyle Reese look so familiar?," audiences may well have asked themselves, after hypothetically having paid to see Terminator Genisys. It wasn't because he looked like the Michael Biehn Kyle Reese from The Terminator, or the Anton Yelchin Kyle Reese from Terminator Salvation, or the Jonathan Jackson Kyle Reese from The Sarah Connor Chronicles, or the ... oh, gosh, this franchise is a sack of wet cats, canonically speaking. Maybe they'll clear everything up in Terminator 7.
No, the Kyle Reese presented in Alan Taylor's 2015 addition to the ever-branching Machine War timeline was, in fact, none other than Jai Courtney, a young up-and-comer who was dipping his toes in the waters of movie stardom at the time. Courtney brought a lot to the Terminator Genisys table — a graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, he'd studied at the same school that brought us Hugh Jackman, Jim Jeffries, and Tim Minchin, while sporting the physiology granted to a lucky few by the Australian National Hemsworth Underground Vitruvian Clone Laboratory ... presumably.
Unfortunately for fans of the soft reboot, Genisys never really got off the ground in the way that the studio had hoped. Still, like the juggernauts of metallic death that he once swore to shoot a bunch, Courtney would be back. And he did some stuff before that. Really, he's just a terribly busy performer, and good for him, you know?
Jai Courtney cut his teeth on All Saints
You know how every actor in America, on their way either up or down the ladder of success, winds up on an episode of Law & Order? Australia had one of those shows, too — a primetime medical drama called All Saints, that served as a catch-all for performers in need of beer money. Between 1998 and 2009, it featured just about everyone on the continent: Luke Hemsworth did an episode, basically the entire cast of Farscape showed up at one point or another, and a bright-eyed young Jai Courtney landed his first credited television work, credited in two episodes in 2008, "Little Decisions" and "Horses for Courses."
Courtney does a little clowning around as Harry Avent in the season 11 episodes, and is considerably easier to spot in the second one after landing a full-blown story arc. It is, if nothing else, a reminder that everyone starts somewhere, and most people start on hour-long medical dramas.
Jai Courtney lived through A Good Day to Die Hard
In 2013, the Die Hard franchise continued its 5-0 streak of movies with successively dorkier names. A Good Day to Die Hard hit theaters that Valentine's Day, returning the series to its R-rated roots and answering fans' deafening cries of "What happened to that kid from the first Die Hard that we saw for seven or eight seconds?"
The answer, it seems, is that he grew up to look a lot like Jai Courtney, who plays Jack McClane, the estranged secret CIA agent progeny of John. Sent on a deep cover mission to Russia, as sure as there is a sunrise in the morning, he is soon joined by his gruff but lovable father, and sporadic action violence commences.
Despite a substantial $300 million take at the box office, A Good Day to Die Hard failed to breathe life back into the iconic action franchise, putting the kibosh on any potential future crossover events where Jack McClane teamed up with, say, Mutt Williams and Adonis Creed.
Jai Courtney gets mean in Divergent
The 2010s were a golden age for dystopian YA novel adaptations. No franchise encapsulated the phenomenon better than The Hunger Games. And no franchise encapsulated the phenomenon of The Hunger Games as much as Divergent.
Based on the series of books by Veronica Roth, the Divergent series told the unforgettable story of a group of young folks who've grown up in a society divided into five factions: selfless Abnegations, clever clog Erudites, peaceful Amities, honest Candors, and the courageous Dauntless.
In the film adaptation, Jai Courtney joins the cast of Divergent as the villainous character Eric, aged up a few years from his literary roots but otherwise hitting all the same beats. He's ruthless and cunning, and in the end, pays for his sins by going the way of all heavy-handed social commentary villains in books for teenagers — by taking a punitive bullet to his perfectly sculpted coif. "What goes around comes around," as they say.
Jai Courtney came back around for Suicide Squad
Once Guardians of the Galaxy hit it big at the box office, it wasn't long before Warner Bros. went digging for their own loveable gang of homicidal scofflaws. Enter Suicide Squad, the hypercolor David Ayer production that introduced a new generation of audiences to some of DC's most beloved misfits. Alongside Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn and Will Smith's Deadshot, viewers got their first big screen, big budget look at none other than Captain Boomerang, a character best described as "the Kite-Man of Flash villains."
First appearing in The Flash back in 1960, Captain Boomerang is a classic member of the Scarlet Speedster's rogue's gallery. He's one of those reliable villains that does exactly what it says on the tin: he loves boomerangs. Exploding boomerangs, flaming boomerangs, heck, even regular old run-of-the-mill boomerangs. He bears a passing similarity to a Marvel character named Boomerang, but that's probably inconsequential.
Courtney played Captain Boomerang with infectious enthusiasm in Suicide Squad. His performance was one of the movie's highlights — enough so, in fact, that he's slated to make his return to the screen in the 2021 follow-up, The Suicide Squad. However, based on writer-director James Gunn's tweets about how he had free reign to kill off any character in the film, you might not want to get too attached.