With Tuesday’s official confirmation of the actor’s for the roles for the new Suicide Squad movie, fans finally got some news relating to a project that many of them thought that they would never see. The cast is pretty varied, between A-listers Will Smith and Jared Leto to Cara Delevinge, who has less than 5 movie credits to her name at the moment. In between these two extremes is Margot Robbie, who first got noticed on the short-lived Pan-Am television series, but who rose to fame with last year’s Wolf of Wall Street.
Since the character’s introduction in the 1990s, there has actually been little explanation behind much of her character development, other than having fallen in love with the Joker while his prison psychiatrist. This led her to break him out and led her into a career of crime, but since then the character has morphed somewhat, often acting as a DC Comics version of Deadpool, though definitely more villainous, who interacts with the readers in ways that other characters do not. Sassiness is a trait associated with the character that goes well beyond that of most female characters that have that as dominant personality trait. In all of her “live” appearances, either as an animated character or a video game character, there has been one common aspect of this sassiness, and that has been the character’s Brooklyn accent, sometimes a lot weaker, and sometimes very pronounced.
For her role, she received numerous year-end acting nominations, which meant that most critics that her accent was believable and authentic enough, and it is the same accent which is a necessity for Harley Quinn in the film, a character with a dedicated following that the movie will need to get right versus the others. After all, Tom Hardy can mess up as Rick Flag, or Jai Courtney could mess up as Boomerang, but if the movie doesn’t get every aspect of Harley Quinn right then at least in some respects the movie will be considered a failure, and DC Comics will have failed to get a specific part of its fan base engaged in a way that it hoped to.