STACK #202 Aug 2021

CINEMA FEATURE

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STACK gets the lowdown on The Suicide Squad reboot from director James Gunn and his cast. Words Gill Pringle

G uardians of the Galaxy director-writer James Gunn had a very clear vision of how to reboot the titular DC characters for The Suicide Squad , deftly separating it from David Ayer’s 2016 PG-13 Suicide Squad and prepping the audience for a very different ensemble of incarcerated supervillains in his new (US) R-rated version. Co-producer Peter Safran had no doubt that Gunn was the man for the job: “I remember the first time James pitched the idea and we learned that one of the primary characters would be a 200ft pink starfish. Once you get over that and you’ve bought in on the starfish, everything else is fair game,” he laughs. Given the green light to make the movie of his own fantastical imagination, Gunn set about ensuring that his own take on The Suicide

Boomerang, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag and Viola Davis’s Amanda Waller serve among the few holdovers from Ayer's original film, Gunn trawling for obscure DC comic book characters to flesh out his new iteration. “I knew I wanted to bring Harley and Boomer back, but there were other characters I also wanted to use. I literally plugged into Google, ‘Who is the dumbest supervillain of all time?’ and Polka-Dot Man always came up near the top, so being able to take a character like that and give him heart was fun for me. “I love rats, so Rat Catcher was an easy one. I wrote Bloodsport for Idris [Elba] because I wanted to work with him, so it didn’t matter who the character was, it was more like, ‘Let’s find a character obscure enough that we can build our own cinematic creation for

Squad would never be accused of being dull. “If it’s the same boring three-act structure every time, people will be bored. I felt a sense of magic and purpose and destiny the whole time we were making the movie,” he tells STACK . Gunn’s take on The Suicide Squad has already been described as hilarious, gory, unpredictable and completely insane, and STACK cannot disagree. Clearly the same can be said about this cast while shooting the film at Atlanta’s Pinewood Studios and on location in Panama. “This is a beautiful dysfunctional family,” says Alice Braga, who plays revolutionary leader Sol Soria, one of the few non super-powered cast members. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Jai Courtney’s

AUGUST 2021

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