Suicide Squad Director Unveils Alternate Harley Quinn Design

David Ayer’s Suicide Squad is in the rearview mirror at this point with Birds of Prey just days away. But, the Internet discovered one of the director’s concept looks for Harley Quinn this weekend. Instead of the fishnets and red and blue sportswear she wore in that movie, this look tries to dig into the harlequin theme even harder. The dyed hair is still there but the bodysuit is absolutely playing into that polar opposite effect the final design took to. Fishnet is all over and the mesh on the sides is a little bit wider but colored in corresponding red and blue. Interestingly enough, the jacket managed to stay. It’s a departure from the first look, but there’s enough DNA still there. Robbie had to do a lot of work to get herself ready for this role and talked about how she approached it psychologically.

“There’s definitely an aspect to her that took me a while to understand, and that was why she would stay in a relationship with a guy that abuses her,” Robbie told Variety. “But that only took a little bit of research, and reading — and then something eventually clicks into place. I read the play ‘Fool For Love,’ and suddenly I understood her relationship with Mr. J in a way that I couldn’t before that.”

The actress would also mention the fact that schizophrenia holds a stigma in popular culture. No matter how prevalent it is in our society, we still have a ways to go with depictions of mental health.

“[Harley is] a psychiatrist who understands mental illness, but also has mental illness herself,” Robbie began. “Schizophrenia was a big one that I focused on, because, in the original screenplay, which is always what I go to, one of the lines was, ‘It’s the voices in my head.’ So I clung on to that — it’s the voices in her head. ‘Who are the voices? What are they saying? How many voices are there, and at what times do they kick in?’ There’s amazing TED Talks from women who in a lot of cases were career professionals, they had PhDs — incredibly intelligent women who had schizophrenia. One of the women was saying how one of the voices in her head gave her all the answers to her final medical exam, for example. Just stuff like that, that I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is so great for Harley. This is fascinating!‘”