“I think the one thing about it that was so special, is it wasn’t just confrontation for the sake of confrontation,” Cena says. “When people see The Suicide Squad, they’ll understand the stakes and certainly the emotion involved in it. I was very happy with the way it came out, in those regards.”
By the time these two characters have to take each other out, we’ve seen them go from reluctant co-workers on a mission to almost (but not quite) friends. Both of them have a point (although most people’s sympathies will probably sit with Rick here, and that’s understandable), and you can sense that neither of them really wants to be fighting the other.
“You want a fight to be a story and you want it to be a struggle for life and death,” Kinnaman says. “Anyone that has been in a real fight knows how time just completely compresses and, one second can feel like two minutes. I’ve never been in a life and death situation like that, but I can just imagine all the little interactions and all the things that are being said to one another. I didn’t think that we were going to get that much story out of that fight scene as we did.”
A scene like this wouldn’t have had the same amount of impact if the story surrounding it didn’t do such a good job building up to the violence. Both Kinnaman and Cena credit director James Gunn with setting everything on the right path, which allowed the chemistry between the cast to grow.
“Everyone was having so much fun with each other,” Kinnaman says. “I was so impressed by John the first few days, just the bizarre, perverted things that came out of his mouth in that Peacemaker costume. His ad-libs were just out of control, and just really, really professional at the same time. James created this vibe on set that was incredible. It really felt magic to step on set… it was just this playground that we got to enter every day, and everyone’s on top of their game and doing their best work.”
“I think the environment says a lot about how we crafted our characters, and certainly that comes from the top,” Cena says. “James set an environment where it was very practical, with large set pieces, and we were able to take some risks.”