Zack Snyder Says He Loved Jared Leto As The Joker

Almost as soon as it was announced that the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign had succeeded and the reassembled version of Justice League would be heading exclusively to HBO Max, the focus then shifted to another one of the DCEU’s movies that was the subject of some high-profile studio interference.

Suicide Squad may have done big business at the box office, but neither fans nor critics were particularly impressed, and given the widely-publicized tales of competing edits and Warner Bros.’ desire to lighten the original tone, director David Ayer has never been shy in admitting that the version of the movie that hit theaters bore very little resemblance to the pitch that got him the job in the first place.

Speculation surrounding a potential release for the Ayer Cut has only increased over the last month, with the filmmaker dropping never-before-seen images on social media and frequently talking up his darker and more mature take on the material, with Jared Leto’s maligned Joker reportedly the biggest casualty of the studio’s heavy-handed involvement in post-production.

In a recent exchange with a fan on Vero, Zack Snyder showed some solidarity with Ayer when he admitted that he loved Jared Leto as the Joker, which you can check out below. However, there might be more to his comments than initially meets the eye.

Maybe this is reading a little too much into it, but Snyder completely ignores the question of if he wanted to see Leto’s Joker square off against Ben Affleck’s Batman, despite the two arch-nemeses having already briefly shared the screen in Suicide Squad. He also says he loved the actor in the part, but doesn’t reference the actual performance itself, and there are a lot of people that share the opinion that the undeniably talented and Academy Award-winning actor was an inspired choice for the role, but he just approached it in the completely wrong way.

That being said, given recent events, it appears that nobody can be completely ruled out of a return to the world of DC adaptations anymore, and in the likely event that the Ayer Cut gets the official go-ahead, we could see Jared Leto’s Joker painted in an entirely different light.