Suicide Squad: New Look at Jared Leto’s Joker Makeup Test Revealed

Jared Leto’s turn as The Joker was one of the most polarizing elements of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. While some fans hated the drastic redesign of the character, others thought it fit in perfectly with the wild, grungy aesthetic Ayer was trying to establish for the film. As such, the “Release the Ayer Cut” fan campaign that has sprung up since the movie’s release is often tied to Leto’s Joker — a character said to have much more footage on the cutting room floor than he has in the actual movie. Today, “The Ayer Cut” on Twitter released a look at Leto’s initial makeup test (and the prosthetic teeth he wore).

These come from Alessandro Bertolazzi, a makeup artist who won an Academy Award for his work on the film. It’s also the latest in a series of “Ayer Cut” teases revolving around Leto’s Joker, who last appeared in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. 

You can see the images below.

View on X

Asked about the idea of releasing David Ayer’s director’s cut of the film on HBO Max back in November, Leto was definitive. He’d love to see Ayer get the Zack Snyder treatment.

“Absolutely,” Leto told Variety. “Why not? Why wouldn’t they? That’s what streaming’s for, right?”

Whereas the Snyder Cut needed a significant investment to complete it, since Snyder left during production on the film, Ayer’s cut is a different story. Supposedly all of the photography was completed, and only some visual effects work would have remained. Ayer’s cut of the film was supposedly screened in a completed form for Warner Bros. executives before they asked for more edits, and kicked off a process the resulted in the final theatrical version of the movie.

“I put my life into Suicide Squad,” Ayer recently wrote in an open letter. “I made something amazing. My cut is intricate and emotional journey with some bad people who are shit on and discarded (a theme that resonates in my soul). The studio cut is not my movie. Read that again. And my cut is not the 10-week director’s cut – it’s a fully mature edit by Lee Smith standing on the incredible work by John Gilroy. It’s all Steven Price’s brilliant score, with not a single radio song in the whole thing. It has traditional character arcs, amazing performances, a solid third-act resolution. A handful of people have seen it.”

Warner Bros. has previously shot down the idea of releasing the Ayer Cut, with studio exec Ann Sarnoff saying that they would “not be developing” the director’s version of the film.