What role does Jai Courtney play in Dangerous Animals? Character explored

After premiering at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Jai Courtney's Dangerous Animals hit U.S. theaters last week on Friday, June 26, 2025. Set in Australia, the horror-thriller—directed by Sean Byrne and written by Nick Lepard—brings two deadly threats to the big screen at once: a deranged serial killer and shark-infested waters.

In Dangerous Animals, Jai Courtney plays the serial killer Bruce Tucker. Picture beachgoers getting knocked out, hauled out to sea, tied up, and dangled over waters infested by hungry, razor-toothed creatures. That's exactly what Courtney's character does to unsuspecting tourists—all while singing Baby Shark.

Courtney has previously starred in Suicide Squad, Terminator Genisys, A Good Day to Die Hard, Alita: Battle Angel, and the TV series Spartacus and American Primeval. He also played Eric in the movies Divergent and Insurgent.

Besides Courtney, Dangerous Animals features Yellowstone's Hassie Harrison, Dune: Prophecy's Josh Houston, The White Lotus' Rob Carlton, and more.

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Bruce Tucker: Jai Courtney is a shark-obsessed serial killer in Dangerous Animals

In Dangerous Animals, Jai Courtney plays Bruce Tucker, best known as Tucker, the menacing antagonist targeting unsuspecting tourists on the Gold Coast. On the surface, he's an eccentric and strange man who tries to be charming, running a cage-diving business in Queensland, Australia. He often shares a dramatic tale about falling in love with sharks after surviving a brutal shark attack as a child.

He offers tourists the chance to swim with sharks from the protective confines of an underwater cage. But instead of giving them the one-of-a-kind experience, Tucker feeds them to the sharks and records the footage. One of his victims is surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), who falls prey to his demented, ritualistic shark feedings.

Speaking to Screen Rant's Liam Crowley in an interview published on June 6, 2025, Jai Courtney reflected on playing the serial killer:

"I wish I could say I lived on a boat for six months and alienated myself from society, but mostly it was I drank a bunch of beer and then just tried really hard to get into the head of this wounded child."

In Dangerous Animals, Jai Courtney embraces the full dirtbag character, an unkempt, beard-twirling boat captain and serial killer. Despite finding his way into the mind of his character in the movie, the American Primeval star admitted that there are some things he can't prepare for as an actor, like Tucker's evil ideas, obsessions, and the "fetishized thing around his killings."

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What happened to Jai Courtney's character at the end of Dangerous Animals?

Zephyr becomes the final girl in Jai Courtney's character's sadistic shark drama, and she proves to be a formidable opponent. At the end of Dangerous Animals, instead of Zephyr becoming shark food, she survives to shoot Tucker with a harpoon gun, saying, "Ooby Dooby, motherf**ker." However, Tucker doesn't perish at that point.

The final blow comes when Zephyr knocks Tucker's bloody body into the water, where a large shark eagerly bursts out of the water, seemingly waiting to devour him. The shark catches Tucker in its mouth and drags him underwater.

It's implied that Tucker died at the end of the movie, bringing his story full circle because his obsession with sharks started when a Great White attacked him years ago, hence the giant shark bites in his torso.

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Watch Dangerous Animals in movie theaters.