The incredible professional opportunities continued for Barinholtz after he returned to film the third season of The Mindy Project when he auditioned for a role in Suicide Squad, DC Comics’s big budget super villain team-up co-starring Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, and Viola Davis. The movie, once again, afforded him the chance to try something new. “Going to Suicide Squad was a very different experience. I don't want to say it was agro-male because Margot Robbie is tougher than any of the guys, but it was just a very raucous set,” he said of the gritty, action-heavy blockbuster. “[Director] David Ayer is very dark. He chases that real darkness and says crazy things to you before a take to get your head spinning. He likes to psychologically get in there. He would tell us, ‘You know on Fury, right before a scene, I almost got Shia [LaBeouf] and [Jon] Bernthal into a fistfight.’ And it's like, I don't want to do that!! But he gets great performances out of actors and the movie is so big in scope. When I think of some of those sets, it's like, This is the size of Universal Studios. It was very, very, very different.”

Keeping the details of a super high-profile movie secret has also been a new experience for Barinholtz, who wasn’t even able to speak in depth about the character he plays. “I have David Ayer in my head being like, ‘I'm going to kill you if you say anything,’” he said before thinking for a solid minute. “I can say it's probably not who you think it is. I can say that he's definitely someone that people will not like, and he is someone who likes to really mess with people — likes to really hurt people and fuck them up.”

Off set, the cast of Suicide Squad bonded by getting matching tattoos and while Barinholtz didn’t get one (“My wife said, ‘If you come back with a tattoo from a movie you are in, I'll know what kind of man you are,’” he recalled), he did emerge from the experience with some new impressions to add to his repertoire. Robbie’s Australian accent was just one of the nearly dozen Barinholtz busted out during the course of our hourlong interview. They ranged from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump, and Mindy Kaling to a used car salesman, a chain restaurant waiter, and an old-timey Hollywood agent.