Karen Fukuhara is incredibly excited about her first film, Suicide Squad. It’s easy to see from the smile on her face and the way she almost bounces around while talking about the film, where she debuts as the deadly Katana. Her character helps keep the villains of the Squad in line for Rick Flag as they go on a (suicide) mission to battle a major supernatural threat. While the actress new to the big screen is excited, she’s also taken aback by all the promotion.
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“They’re killing it!” Fukuhara told Comicbook.com of the PR campaign in an interview in New York. “It just blows me away. It’s absolutely amazing how I went from a struggling actor [she said with a laugh] to this! It blows my mind because there was a humongous fanbase in the DC world even before we started filming. Now that the PR is picking up, really picking up, with facebook stickers and all the trailers coming out… It’s amazing! It’s so touching to hear from my friends back home, and even friends from abroad in Taiwan and Japan, sending me pictures of billboards of Suicide Squad. It’s an international thing; I can go anywhere and there’s something representing it, and I love it.”
Fukuhara loved getting to understand Katana throughout the process of building the character. While she purposely tried to avoid other live-action and animated takes on the character so she wouldn’t be mimicking (even accidentally) those, she read tons of comics featuring the supernatural sword-wielder, and looked to the history of the real (and rare) female samurai from her cultural past.
With all that backstory she learned about, she thinks there’s absolutely potential for more Katana, be it in a Squad sequel or a spin-off of her own.
“I’d like to explore where she’s from, what kind of training she comes from – if she gets a stand-alone movie that would be awesome!” Fukuhara said with a huge, hopeful grin. “There’s so much story from the point of her husband’s death to her story leading up to Suicide Squad – that’s something that I’d love to show on the screen.”
For now, fans can see Fukuhara as the stoic Katana in Suicide Squad on August 5, 2016.
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Image courtesy of DC Comics
