Jared Leto may have given Margot Robbie vegan cinnamon buns on the set of Suicide Squad and not the dead rat that had been reported, but that doesn’t mean it was all sunshine and rainbows between the cast of David Ayer’s misguided blockbuster. The Academy Award winner still went to bizarrely exhaustive lengths to get into character as the Joker, and it ultimately turned out to be for nothing.
Not only were the majority of his scenes left on the cutting room floor as Suicide Squad was butchered in the editing suite, but the knives were already out for Leto’s take on the Clown Prince of Crime from the second the first official image of him in full makeup was revealed, with the tattoos all over his face and the gold grill particular cause for consternation among longtime comic book fans.
His performance hardly won over the doubters, either, but he’ll be hoping that his new and hopefully improved Joker goes down much better when Zack Snyder’s Justice League hits HBO Max next month. And while his fresh look as the Jester of Genocide has once again split opinion down the middle, it’s certainly not any worse than it was before.
In fact, we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us he’d be getting a visual upgrade in the film long before it was confirmed – that Leto wants to keep the Knightmare design moving forward if he winds up boarding any more DCEU projects. According to our intel, the 49 year-old hopes to move away from Suicide Squad‘s more garish portrayal and make the Joker much more intense and creepy, which he certainly looks already despite the only evidence so far being two black and white photos.
