Birds of Prey: Margot Robbie Promises Costumes Will Be "Less Male Gaze-y"

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) already won over a lot of [...]

Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) already won over a lot of people's hearts with its production teaser earlier this year, which gave fans the first look at some of the film's costumes. As Robbie revealed in a recent interview with Vogue, the film's aesthetic will continue to take a more feminist approach.

"That's what happens when you have a female producer, director, writer," the film's costume designer, Erin Benach, said in response to the costumes not being as "male fantasy" as Harley Quinn's Suicide Squad outfit.

"Yeah, it's definitely less male gaze–y," Robbie added.

The costumes previewed earlier this year - and through months of subsequent set photos - made this abundantly clear, with Robbie's Harley Quinn and the other female characters being dressed in a much more fashion-forward (and less scantily-clad) way.

"[Margot] has an uncanny ability to focus on what's happening in the moment, and when she needs to shift, she can so perfectly shift." Benach added. "You kind of have a business mind."

Birds of Prey will follow a sort of unlikely team-up between Harley, Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez). Together, the women must work together to rescue a young girl named Cassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) from one of Gotham's most vicious crime lords, Black Mask (Ewan McGregor).

"It's all women and genuinely funny and weird." Winstead said in an interview this May. "It feels from the '90s, in the best way."

The film will be directed by Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs), with a script from Bumblebee's Christina Hodson.

"I pitched the idea of an R-rated girl gang film including Harley, because I was like, 'Harley needs friends.' Harley loves interacting with people, so don't ever make her do a standalone film," Robbie said in one of the first interviews about the film. "She's got to be with other people, it should be a girl gang. I wasn't seeing enough girl gangs on screen, especially in the action space. So that was always a big part of it."

"It's always fun introducing audiences to a new character," Hodson previously told ComicBook.com. "It's great doing a deep dive into all the different characters, doing my research on the characters collectively bit also individually and getting to know them a bit more, and then feeling free to go off leash a little bit and do something new and different and bring them to screen in a way that felt right alongside Harley."

2comments