Runt star Jai Courtney opens up on fatherhood and why he’s passionate about Aussie movies

Jai Courtney has opened up about the moment that propelled him to pursue acting and his close encounter with a black bear.

Becoming a father for the first time last year opened up Jai Courtney’s world in a whole range of ways.

Personally, the Aussie star of Divergent, Suicide Squad, A Good Day To Die Hard and Terminator: Genisys relocated from his adopted home in the urban jungle of Los Angeles to the leafier surrounds of the Catskills Mountains in upstate New York, with his partner, actress Dina Shihabi and their baby daughter.

“I had a black bear in my yard last week,” he says with a laugh over Zoom call from his rustic retreat.

“I was out training on the deck and I heard a big crunch and I look around and not more than 30 meters away there was a big black bear just hanging out.”

Jai Courtney in a scene from the Australian family film Runt.

The move was partly inspired by the desire to create a home base for his new family where “you get to retreat from some of the chaos” that comes with the globetrotting life of an international actor. It also reminded him of where he grew up in Cherrybrook in Sydney’s northwest and the freedom that came with having the bush on his doorstep.

“It’s kind of nice to get back into that and I wanted that for my child too,” he says. “I had such fond memories. We’re in times now where I think it’s hard to imagine being given the freedom that we were as youths to kind of just go off and figure it out and come back at dark.

“I certainly thought it was such a privilege to have trees to climb and terrain to explore your imagination in really. It’s an inspiring place to be when you’re in nature, and whether it’s just on a walk and figuring out your bullshit that you’re trying to work through that particular day, or it’s making forts out of caves and trees. That was always a special part of my childhood, and chasing a bit of that was a big part of moving here.”

Jai Courtney in a scene from the Australian family film Runt.

And professionally, he thinks that the life experience and wisdom that comes with age and fatherhood has already broadened his acting horizons and helped him extract more from the characters he plays.

Now 38, he remembers being a bull at a gate in his twenties when he graduated from the West Australian Academy for the Performing Arts made the leap to international fame with the sword and sandals schlock of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, followed by an eye-catching turn as a hired goon opposite Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher. He wanted it all, he wanted it now and it took him a while to realise the advice given to him by a colleague that “as you get older the roles just get better” might actually be true.

“I think there’s a lot of truth to that,” he says. “As we age as people, life gets richer and you can start to bleed what you’re capable of off screen into that space. Certainly as people crafting stories, characters with a few laps around the block tend to know a thing or two or have more skin in the game and the stakes are higher.

“I have played a few fathers and I hope that’s a trend that continues and I think life’s getting broader and it’s really interesting playing these characters with a little more depth and a little more going on.”

Jai Courtney and Celeste Barber, who play husband and wife in Runt. Picture: Finlay MacKay

Despite appearing in a string of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, Courtney says it tends to be Australian productions that offer him the most interesting and testing parts. He’s returned home regularly for film and TV projects – and has recently wrapped up filming in Queensland when we speak – and some of his most acclaimed roles have included his idealistic young cop alongside Joel Edgerton in the 2013 thriller Felony and as a detention centre guard with a conscience in the star-studded 2020 drama Stateless.

“Australia has always offered me the chance to come and do things that are a slight twist on what tends to come my way in the US and I really am grateful for that,” he says.

“We just make films of the different nature down there, and it’s often been the projects that I get to come home and do that give me a chance to explore characters that are a little less familiar or a little less predictable.”

Jai Courtney in a scene from the Australian family film Runt.

Accordingly, when the opportunity came up to play the dad, batting farmer Bryan Shearer, in the sweet family film Runt, based on Craig Silvey’s beloved kids book of the same name, he was immediately keen. Not only was it a chance to come home, it was also an opportunity to play a genuinely decent human after a string of villain roles.

Initially the dates clashed with another project, but when it was pushed back due to last year’s Screen Actors Guild strike, Courtney packed his bags and headed to the tiny town of York in remote Western Australia. There he joined Celeste Barber, who plays his long-suffering wife, rising star Lily LaTorre, who plays his daughter, and a who’s who of veteran homegrown talent including Deborah Mailman, Matt Day and Jack Thompson in the charming tale of a stray who becomes an unlikely champion show dog.

Jai Courtney and Celeste Barber in a scene from the Australian family film Runt.

“The character on the page is this beautiful, tender, selfless, providing, present father figure who just has such warmth, and he’s carrying a huge load himself, but there’s just such integrity in what Bryan’s about.

“As you probably know, I usually show up to be the bad guy and more often than not get killed at the end of the film, so it was lovely to see something refreshingly different from that. And I think stepping into the role of being a father myself last year, it just spoke to me in a way.”

In signing on to the film, Courtney knew he was doubly breaking the old acting adage of never working with animals or children. La Torre, he says, was “inspiration” as was her brother Jack, who plays her screen brother too. The rescue dog Squid, who plays the titular pooch Runt, maybe not so much, although he doesn’t want to lay too much blame at her paws.

“Well the children were a delight,” Courtney says with a laugh. “Some of the most professional actors I’ve ever had the pleasure of sharing the screen with. And the animal? “Look, it is a well-known joke in our business, but there’s some truth to it of course. I think working with animals, the interesting part of it is that your day can turn a direction that you are simply not prepared for. It’s completely unreasonable as humans with our production schedule and a bunch of expectations, and money ticking by by the minute, to assume that working with an animal – no matter how well trained – that things are going to stay on target.”

Courtney was also taken with the sweet father-daughter dynamic between Bryan and his daughter Annie, as he encourages her to chase her dreams and embrace the qualities that make her unique. He says that after he finished high school and was drifting along doing odd jobs, his parents were supportive once he settled on acting – and hopes that he would do the same.

“It is one of those pursuits that doesn’t offer a lot of security, that’s for sure,” he says. “And anyone that knows anything about the world of it, it can be a daunting thing to take on. I’m a father and if my daughter wanted to become an actor, I’d think it’s a fantastic thing. My folks were incredibly supportive. It was really one of the few things that really I was excelling at as a youngster through drama and through school and I was passionate about it.”

And it certainly beats the alternative. At one point Courtney’s dad suggested he get a trade if he didn’t want to go to university, which galvanised the young man into actually acting on his dream.

“I just thought ‘what sort of trade am I doing to do? Who makes the most money?’. And he goes ‘well, plumbers do all right, but you have to dig holes all the time’. And I thought ‘f--- that – I’m not digging holes – I’m going to be an actor’. And it’s working out so far. If it all falls apart, I still don’t know what the back-up plan is but I’ll try to avoid that at all costs.”

Runt is in cinemas on September 19.

Originally published as Runt star Jai Courtney opens up on fatherhood and why he’s passionate about Aussie movies