Nothing quite prepared Joel Kinnaman for the rigours, benefits and insane delights of co-starring in Suicide Squad. The Toronto shoot turned out to be different than anything the Swedish-American actor had ever experienced before.

Even his time on the set of the cyberpunk reboot of RoboCop in 2014 pales in comparison — despite the familiarity of the locale, because RoboCop was also shot in Toronto. “It’s much bigger,” Kinnaman says of the scale of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. “I mean, this movie is about twice the size of RoboCop!”

In the new DC comic book movie, the 36-year-old Kinnaman plays Rick Flag. He is the military-trained but reluctant leader of the Squad. The movie is an origins story for what becomes the self-named “Suicide Squad” and we see in early scenes how a government agency decides to use these supervillains as disposable agents in a save-the-world mission led by Flag.

“He thinks this is a horrible idea,” Kinnaman says of Flag’s initial reaction when the Squad is deployed in an apocalyptic crisis in Midway City. “He wants to solve this with his own team of operatives that he knows and that he can trust. But now he has to deal with these psychopaths who do not follow orders, who just go their own way. But, over the course of the movie, he sees how effective they are and also that they have a moral foundation that they stand on, even though it takes a different shape than his. He begins to appreciate a lot of these people and his allegiance starts to shift towards them.”

As Rick Flag, Kinnaman’s character represents one of the most “real-life” types in the movie. At his side, he has his own team of soldiers, in addition to the Squad’s supervillains. Some are played by actual U.S. veterans from black-ops squads.

The whole approach fit into Ayer’s desire to turn Suicide Squad into a reality-based world that happens to include superheroes and supervillains. Kinnaman, for one, admires this gritty approach. Especially when it comes to the action scenes in which Flag leads his team and the Squad into battle.

“I love when it’s real action,” Kinnaman says. “It bores me to watch a city get demolished in CG. I have seen it so many times. It doesn’t give me anything. I mean, a lot of people pay money to do see it but, for me personally, I’m bored by that and it feels very predictable and just kind of an easy way to make it feel like it’s on a grand scale.”

Instead of that approach, Ayer’s reality-based action falls into the same camp as George Miller’s Mad Max reboot, Kinnaman says. Both movies share the same stunt team and the quality of the work is obvious on-screen.

Kinnaman himself avoided doing his most dangerous stunts, though. “Uh, no! I would love to say that I do all my own stunts but I am doing as much as I can. I’ll do the stuff that matters when we are in close. But jumping out of a truck that is speeding 50 miles an hour, I’m not going to do that!”

It is a practical matter, Kinnaman says. “If a stunt man sprains his ankle or breaks his leg in a worst-case scenario, of course it’s really bad and tragic. But, if one of the leads of the film does that, then the whole production is in jeopardy. So you have to choose where to put your emphasis.”

Funnily enough, despite the stunts and shootouts and military missions that so intrigue Kinnaman, his favourite Suicide Squad scene is not even an action sequence. It is a talkie bar scene that will become legendary when the movie debuts Aug. 5.

“It’s quite obvious that the world is going under and we’re all going to die,” Kinnaman says of the story moment when the Squad members retreat to an abandoned bar for drinks and candid conversations in the midst of mayhem.

The sequence smashes serious material upside black comedy and deep insights into the characters, Kinnaman boasts. “Credit to David, who can create a world that can hold all of that!”

In the bar scene, which was shot on King Street in the club district of downtown Toronto, it becomes obvious that the movie is exploring deeper themes than audiences expect in most action pictures. Kinnaman finds that exciting.

“I think that’s what I really like about the script: It questions what is a hero, what is a bad guy, and I think it is all in a grey zone. That’s kind of the underlying theme of the movie. I think we see some ‘good guys’ doing some bad things and some really ‘bad guys’ doing some good things.”

Twitter: @Bruce_Kirkland

BKirkland@postmedia.com