Scott Eastwood recently stopped by the HuffPost Live studio on Tuesday to talk about his role in summer blockbuster “Suicide Squad.”
The 30-year-old inherited some acting chops from his movie-star father, Clint. Eastwood grew up in Hawaii with his mother, but he moved to California to live with his father during high school. And though Eastwood said his dad never pressured him to join the biz, he quickly caught the acting bug.
“Telling stories, that’s what I like about film,” said Eastwood. “It’s just really telling stories. As long as they can be different and something excites you every day, then you can get up to work and say, ‘Oh, this is cool. We’re telling a different story.’”
Eastwood has already mastered the teenage heartthrob gig after his role in 2015’s “The Longest Ride,” adapted from a Nicholas Sparks’ book, made his face a fixture on the lockers — or more likely the phone wallpapers — of middle-school girls around the nation. Now, he’s moving on to the world of big-budget movies and Oscar-winning directors, with upcoming films like “Suicide Squad” and “Snowden.”
“Will Smith is a constant movie star,” said Eastwood on filming with the all-star “Suicide Squad” cast. “He’s the guy that really leads the ship. He keeps morale high when its 4 in the morning and you’ve been shooting for five months in Toronto.”
“We shot three months out of the five months of the filming at night, so that was tough,” he added. “You have a little bit of a vampire lifestyle for the summer.”
Eastwood has a tough role in the film, playing the good guy surrounded by a cast of fan-favorite villains. He plays Lieutenant “GQ” Edwards in the highly anticipated but critically panned movie, who’s in charge of bad guys Harley Quinn and The Joker.
“It was interesting with Harley Quinn,” said Eastwood. “I wasn’t really familiar with it before I got into the film, but it was interesting to see the Joker having a girlfriend and this crazy, sort of love-hate relationship.”
The cast of “Suicide Squad” got extremely close during those dark Toronto nights (Will Smith has said they text “60 to 80” times a day), but Jared Leto, who plays “The Joker,” famously never broke character during filming.
“It’s funny because I had met Jared Leto as Jared Leto before, and then I didn’t get to meet Jared Leto again until after the film was over, because he was the Joker the whole time,” said Eastwood, adding that he thought it was “really cute” when Leto sent his movie-girlfriend Margot Robbie a live pet rat.
Eastwood is currently wrapping up filming for the eighth “Fast & Furious” film, a “meaningful” part for the actor, who was “very close” to the late Paul Walker. When he does get some rare downtime, he’s an avid helicopter pilot and practices jiujitsu. Sleep, however, is not always on the menu.
“I’m good at napping,” he said. “You gotta find that sweet spot.”
See “Suicide Squad” in theaters everywhere Friday.
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