Talk of the "Ayer Cut" of Suicide Squad went away for a while, but it's come back with a vengeance in recent weeks. Now, Scott Eastwood has become the latest actor to speak out on David Ayer's original vision for his 2016 DC Comics adaptation during a recent interview with Insider.
The actor, who played soldier GQ Edwards but was at one time rumoured to be Steve Trevor, told the site that the filmmaker had big plans for the newly created character. "He basically was like, 'Come on this journey with me. I'm going to make you look like a badass. I'm going to make your character pop," Eastwood recalled. "I didn't even know what the character was at the time."
"I have talked to David, and I know my character got a lot more love in the Ayer Cut," he added.
In the theatrical cut of Suicide Squad, the A.R.G.U.S. agent didn't bring much to the table and is thought to have died off-screen after setting that charge in an effort to stop Incubus. Whether he would have lived in the "Ayer Cut" is hard to say, but if Warner Bros. did kill Edwards off in reshoots, then it could be a result of Eastwood refusing to sign a multi-picture deal with the studio.
"They didn't want to pay me any money for those next movies and they didn't have another script for the other movie, so I didn't know what I was going to be signing myself up for," he explains, before recalling a conversation with his father Clint Eastwood. "I said, 'They don't want to pay me.' He said, 'If it feels like they really need you and if it's a good part, then do it. If not, then don't.'"
"I didn't have the answer to those questions at that time," Eastwood continued. "I wasn't going to have the answers, and they were pressuring me. So ultimately it didn't happen."
There's nothing to suggest James Gunn wanted the actor for The Suicide Squad regardless of whether he had any sort of sequel option. However, it's entirely possible he would have been asked to reprise the role of GQ in the version of Suicide Squad 2 that Gavin O'Connor was once developing.