'Suicide Squad' News, Spoilers: Jared Leto on Reinventing the Joker; Film Reportedly Getting Reshoots for Added Humor
Actor Jared Leto, who took on the iconic role of the Joker for the upcoming DC antihero team-up film "Suicide Squad," said that taking on the villainous part is not unlike how other actors portray Hamlet onstage and onscreen.
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Leto spoke about how he felt about portraying the Joker, the character's long and storied history in cinema, and crafting his own spin on the popular supervillain.
According to the actor, putting his own stamp on the character was important as the role has been filled by so many top-notch actors before him. Leto took over the role from the late actor Heath Ledger, who famously played the Joker in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" (2008). Ledger won a posthumous Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal. Before that, Jack Nicholson, another Oscar winner, took on the role of the Joker in "Batman" (1989).
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"The work that's been done on this character by so many people before me has been so impactful, so incredible, so much fun, so profound, so risky, that it's a very special thing to be asked to take on that responsibility," Leto, an Oscar winner himself, told EW.
"You just knew you had to do something different," he said. "You had to make it your own."
According to the actor, reinterpreting is important in any art form and it happens all the time, "from Scarface to Hamlet." "Whether you're a composer working on a piece of music that was written a century ago, or you're an actor on stage, reinterpreting a play, it's very common these days," he explained.
Meanwhile, parts of the upcoming "Suicide Squad" will reportedly go through re-shoots to add more comedic moments. According to a report by Birth Movies Death, the decision to put the film through pricey reshoots came after fans responded favorably to the moments of levity in the film's latest trailers. Seeing how fans reacted to the jokes in the "Suicide Squad" promos, the movie's producers reportedly requested that reshoots be done to modify the film's tone and add more of the lightness that fans responded to.
Adding more humor to the film would also set "Suicide Squad" apart from "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," which has received much criticism for its dark and somber tone.
"Suicide Squad" hits theaters August 5.
