The story goes that Jared Leto, when playing Joker in the first, darker Suicide Squad movie, gave his fellow cast members some shocking gifts. One of them, as legend has it, was a dead (?) rat. It was given to Margot Robbie, who played his onscreen paramour, Harley Quinn. Like many wild tales, it might be apocryphal. Leto has denied it. (He says he gave her vegan cinnamon buns — a pretty simple mix-up, if you ask us.) But in a new profile with Robbie in British Vogue, the plot seems to thicken.
The piece is centered around the DC film’s semi-sequel, which jettisons, among other things, director David Ayer and co-star Will Smith. Robbie’s Harley Quinn, who got her own zany solo film, Birds of Prey, is one of the ones who came back, joining a greatly expanded cast of newbies. Among the returning is Viola Davis, who played Amanda Waller, shady leader of the Task Force X program. And the way she tells it, it was a rat, not vegan foodstuffs. What’s more, it sounds like it wasn’t dead.
Davis recalls the infamous rehearsal at which Leto handed out his fun gifts. Robbie had no idea she was about to be pranked. As per Davis:
“I was saying loudly, ‘Don’t open the box!’ I was halfway out the door when she opened the box … and saw the biggest black rat you could imagine. Then… she cooed at it. No fear. Open. Receptive. Full of joy.”
Davis doesn’t explicitly say the rat was very much still kicking, but it certainly doesn’t seem like Robbie’s thing to, uh, coo at a rodent corpse. In any case, a story that was already bottomlessly bizarre somehow keeps finding new ways to get weirder. In the meantime, Leto is not among the returning cast for The Suicide Squad, which arrives on July 30.
(Via British Vogue)