James Gunn Says DCU Harley Quinn Role Is Margot Robbie’s If She Wants It

Harley Quinn is causing chaos once again. But this time, it’s not her fault. After all, the entire universe changed around her. The first film version of Harley Quinn came to the screen in Suicide Squad, a little-loved movie that rode the superhero boom to a huge box office return. While that movie suffered from countless problems, everyone agreed that Margot Robbie was the perfect Harley Quinn. Everyone did not agree, however, about the quality of her (excellent, in this writer’s opinion) follow-up, Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).

So divisive was Birds of Prey that people wondered if James Gunn would use the reboot of the DCU to recast the character, despite the fact that he worked with her on his first (pre-reboot) project, The Suicide Squad. In today’s DC Studios Showcase podcast, Gunn set the record straight. “Harley is a character I’m almost certainly going to use the DCU, and if Margot wants to play her, then I’ll bend over backwards to explain that in the world,” he declared. “But if she doesn’t, then I might have to go with someone else, where I don’t have to acknowledge what happened to Harley in this universe.”

The statement comes in a special episode in which Gunn, along with co-hosts and Peacemaker stars Jennifer Holland and Steve Agee, address questions about canon in the DCU. It’s certainly not the first time that Gunn has had to wrestle with the question, as even Den of Geek directly asked him about it, back when he described himself as “a balanced canon guy.”

But Harley Quinn poses a particularly tricky problem. Harley, of course, stems from television originally, first appearing on Batman: The Animated Series, where voice actor Arleen Sorkin set the character’s spunky attitude and Bronx accent. Harley immediately became the break-out hit of the show, and soon not only arrived in the comic books, but regularly carries her own series. She’s the main character of a beloved HBO animated show, where she’s voiced by Kaley Cuoco, and was recently played by Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux.

In other words, there are a lot of different takes to choose from when it comes to Harley Quinn. And Gunn has shown that he’s willing to go in interesting directions when it comes to recasting characters, most notably David Corenswet replacing Henry Cavill to play a more innocent Superman and Kyle Chandler replacing Ryan Reynolds to play an older Green Lantern.

But, thus far, The Suicide Squad has been largely canonical to Gunn’s DCU. He’s only made changes to that movie when its absolutely necessary, and has carried over nearly every event and character, a point demonstrated by the fact that Rick Flag Sr.’s hatred of Peacemaker, who killed his son in The Suicide Squad, led to the creation of Salvation, the prison planet at the center of next year’s Man of Tomorrow.

For Gunn, the bigger issue is Robbie’s talent as a performer. Throughout the podcast episode, he praises what she was able to bring to the role, while also acknowledging that her status has only grown since then. He may want her to play Harley one more time, but she may just not have room on her schedule to make it happen.

Which would be a shame. While other performers can and have brought something interesting to the character, Birds of Prey remains one of the most compelling takes on Harley Quinn, one that fully moved her out of the Joker’s shadow (but not yet quite to Poison Ivy’s side) in the public opinion. Her twisted fairytale princess sequences in The Suicide Squad are among the best scenes in Gunn’s filmography. They would both benefit from working on another Harley Quinn project again.

But as of right now, we just don’t know what will happen. Which is exactly how Harley wants us to feel.