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MARGOT ROBBIE IN BIRDS OF PREY

After splitting with the Joker, Harley Quinn joins superheroes Black Canary, Huntress and Renee Montoya to save a young girl from an evil crime lord. Australian actress Margot Robbie reveals all about her lead role in the comics.

How did you first come across the Birds of Prey comics? You have a history with Harley, but what drew you to these other characters? So, probably four years ago, while we were still shooting Suicide Squad, I had the feeling that I wasn’t going to be ready to let go of Harley after making that film, and that there was still so much to her that I wanted to explore. As a fan of hers from reading the comics, I thought there was still so much material there and so much we could look into. Through reading the comics as my research for Harley I ended up reading a lot of the Birds of Prey comics. And at the time I was also wondering why there weren’t more female ensemble action films out in the world. I couldn’t think of any recent prominent ones, ones that really hit and everyone loved. But I loved those films growing up. I feel like in real life so many girls roll together in a group, and it’s just such a hive community amongst females, and I was curious as to why we rarely saw that represented on screen. So my idea, really, was to make a female ensemble action film, and I thought the Birds of Prey would be a great platform for that because there are so many different characters in the comics that weave in and out of the main group that there would be more opportunity in that sort of grouping. How did you begin the creative process? I started speaking to a writer, Christina Hodson. I had read some of her samples before, even before she had done Bumblebee, and we sat down and immediately hit it off in that first meeting. She started reading the comics, too, and she just understood Harley’s voice in a way that I felt so few people could. She really has a similar sense of humor, weirdly enough, and we both loved the same movies, we loved the same comics. We seemed to gravitate towards the same things constantly. So we kicked things off with a wide array of ideas and I, of course, had certain comics that I wanted to pay homage to, and certain films I wanted to pay homage to, and she did as well. More than anything, though, we really wanted to tell a story that had a female ensemble cast, that worked in the action/comedy space, and didn’t feel formulaic; those were our main criteria. We really didn’t want the three-act structure to be so obvious that the audience would know what’s going to come next. So, unpredictable like Harley herself? Exactly. And something else I really wanted was to contain the world to a certain part of Gotham, for a couple of reasons. One, I was starting to feel quite desensitized to cities being blown up. I felt like I had been seeing that a lot in films, and I found myself as an audience member desensitized to it. So I was hoping to contain the world to mafia or gang level sort of stakes, which are still life-and-death stakes, but you don’t have a huge CGI sequence where all of Gotham is blown up. And it also has the added advantage of explaining why Batman isn’t diving in to save the day. So, where did you set the story, then? We’re really operating in the outskirts of Gotham. If you think of Gotham as New York City, as most people do, Bruce Wayne exists in Manhattan, and Harley and the Birds of Prey are in the outskirts: we’re in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx. So we thought that could give an additional life to the world in that things are a little scrappier, a little messier. We’re not in a polished financial district. We are in kind of a grungy, fun, poppy, colorful version of Gotham, because we are in those outskirts. Tell me about your choice of Black Canary for the group. Black Canary, Dinah Lance, is another key member of the Birds of Prey in the comics. We knew we didn’t want her to feel too goody-twoshoes because she still needed to exist in this world, she had grown up in this place, and she also needed to be feeling stifled or oppressed by the system that she’s working within. But for her, she feels more like, why fight the system? You’re better off just every man for themselves, every woman for themselves, keep your head down, stay out of it, it’s not worth it.

You’re telling the origin of the character, so you have to start from a different place than her already being a hero? Exactly. We’re starting from a place where she has powers, but she’s not willing to use them, which is really interesting. She has her own reasons why? because her mother was killed trying to help the GCPD, and she had the same powers, and look where that got her. Jurnee [Smollet-Bell] plays her perfectly and has a beautiful voice, too, which is a key aspect to the character. How does Harley Quinn, who isn’t traditionally part of this heroic girl gang, fit in with these other characters? This whole movie really is an origin story and a platform for the Birds of Prey to come together. But I really recognized once Suicide Squad came out how much fan support was behind Harley, and how much people said, “I want to see more Harley.” Which was amazing and such a gift, but I wanted that to happen for other female DC characters, because there are so many, and they’re amazing. So, I thought, let’s put as many DC female characters in here as we can. Including Cassandra Cain? Yeah. We knew we wanted a MacGuffin in the story, and Cass is the character that brings all the Birds together. And she’s also bringing all the drama and the danger together as well. She’s attracting mercenaries from all over Gotham, especially Roman Sionis and Victor Zsasz, his sadistic right-hand man. Ewan McGregor and Chris Messina are terrific together in these roles. And Ella Jay Basco is a real discovery. Yeah, we were so fortunate to have Ewan and Chris, they are amazing and really wonderful and took their characters’ villainy beyond what we could have imagined and had so much fun with it. And Ella is so perfect as Cass, we were so lucky to find her. Cass is a critical role as she is the gravitational center pulling all these forces together, which means inevitably everyone collides and mayhem ensues.

What prompted you to devise her part of the story, to make her the catalyst that unites the other characters? I was fascinated by a relationship that I read in one of the comics, called “Behind Blue Eyes,” where Harley ends up kidnapping a young girl because she has digital data in the retinas of her eyes, and everyone’s after that data. Ultimately what happens in the comic is Harley betrays the girl, but afterwards she feels really bad. And when I was trying to figure out who Harley was, that comic was one of the most pivotal moments in the research. It helped me understand who she is, because she’s not a good person, but she’s not an evil person; she does feel bad about the bad things she does, so she fascinates me in that way. And I loved the dynamic between Harley and this young girl, and so Cass really became that relationship. Christina and I just loved the idea of a mentor/mentee relationship and thought there could be a lot of fun in there, with Harley giving terrible advice, and there’s a lot of humor to be found there, with her being generally completely irritated by the presence of this kid and then, of course, after about five minutes really loving to have her around. In this film, Cass is a little bit like Harley. And of course Harley is going to love a little Harley. One of the great things about your character is that she is predictably unpredictable; you know she’s not going to make the choice that anyone else would make. Exactly, and that’s why she’s so fun to play her as an actor. She’s so unpredictable. It gives me all the options in the world as an actor. I can do anything in a scene when I play Harley and that is such a fun, exhilarating feeling. But you’re right and it’s something I said from the beginning, that she should start this movie in one place and kind of go through this whole whirlwind of events and she’s still the same Harley at the end of the film. She’s just gone on a crazy adventure. But that’s what I love about her, she just is who she is, and she learns things on the way but then she still will make the same mistake the next day. (LAUGHS) What do you want viewers to get out of the experience of watching this movie? I want them to have fun, and I want them to experience the world through Harley’s eyes. For two hours you’re going to hear her version of events. She’s our narrator, and she’s doing a terrible job of it. She’s lying constantly. She’s very unreliable. She’s often telling you something that completely contradicts what you’re seeing on-screen such as, how the breakup with The Joker is going. She’s jumping around in the story. She’s forgetting to introduce you to people. Her personality is ingrained in every scene, in the way she tells this story and how the filmmaking kind of plays out. It’s a little kooky, it’s very colorful, it’s very funny, it’s dangerous, it’s violent, it’s fun. It’s Harley.

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