Even in director David Ayer’s ‘lost’ cut of Suicide Squad, Jared Leto’s Clown Prince of Crime would have been a peripheral figure.
When David Ayer lost final cut of 2016’s Suicide Squad, the film was ultimately cut together by the company who assembled the movie’s flashy and successful trailer. Furthermore, when Suicide Squad was finally released, it was not met with favourable reviews, with scorn in particular being poured upon the small amount of screen time reserved for Jared Leto’s greatly-hyped reimagining of the Joker character, a view supported by Leto himself, who was clearly nonplussed by such a peripheral role.
However, Kevin Hickman, the editor of Suicide Squad chatted to CinemaBlend and revealed that even in David Ayer’s cut, which the director has described as ‘amazing’, Leto’s character would not have featured as heavily as some may believe. For a number of interesting reasons.
“Jared Leto, I thought, did a really good job of playing the Joker. I know there’s a lot of opinions on the matter, but I really liked what he did. He really brought a psychotic character to life and because of the running time and because Jared provided so much material we were not able to use a lot of it”, Hickman said.
“And for a lot of the material, we just couldn’t find a purpose for it because sometimes he would just go off on such crazy, insane tangents and it would be really hard to weave it into the film. Sometimes it just wasn’t appropriate for what he was doing but, it would have been nice to have more of that Joker character a little bit more fleshed out then what came out in the movie.”
So it seems that the plan was never to include Leto to the degree that many expected, with the star’s performance also making cohesive editing somewhat difficult.
Leto’s method approach to the role certainly garnered headlines at the time, and it seems that madcap approach extended to his performances too. Whilst Leto’s time as the character is almost certainly over, at least he got to crown that appearance with a brief cameo in Zack Snyder’s Justice League…
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