The Suicide Squad Crew Teases Epic Harley Quinn Escape Scene

We’re officially a month away from the debut of The Suicide Squad, and the highly-anticipated DC Comics blockbuster has a lot for fans to be excited about. The film will feature a rogue’s gallery of villains from across the DC universe, including Margot Robbie‘s take on Harley Quinn. After Harley became a scene-stealer in 2016’s Suicide Squad and 2020’s Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), fans are excited to see how Harley’s story evolves further — and as producer Peter Safran revealed during a 2019 visit to the film’s set, it will begin with a bang.

“At one point, she gets captured by Luna and his team, and then she has a big escape scene and it will be one of your favorite scenes in the movie,” Safran teased to reporters. “It is just an incredible thing that James [Gunn] and Guy Norse, our coordinator and second director, came up with together and it’s fantastic. It goes through several different arenas on her sequence to get out of there. It’s full-on big-time action, and she’s been working with Guy and with James. She’s incredibly physical, so she’s doing a lot of this stuff herself.”

Fans have already gotten to see segments of what the action scene will entail in the film’s trailers — including some surreal, flower-filled sequences as Harley fights off bad guys. As production designer Beth Mickle explained to reporters, those flourishes will essentially be Harley’s visions of the scene.

“It’s an idea that we’re going to explore and we’ll see how it’s executed,” Mickle explained. “But the idea [is] that there’s a ‘Harley Vision’, like how she sees the world and how she sees things, and it’s possibly with animated flowers and tweety birds. She’s very happy. We explored some concept art to see what that could look like, and how we would render it in the film. Just used sparingly, but I think effectively.”

“Just the juxtaposition of that look with an incredibly violent action scene that is occurring at the same time, as part of her escape,” Safran echoed.

Safran also addressed the aspect of Harley’s ongoing journey across Squad and Birds of Prey, and teased that Robbie’s performance will be “different”, but recognizable to fans.

“I’m not sure how she’s evolved. I think she’s owned it from day one on Squad,” Safran explained. “When I first saw Squad, like a lot of the fans, you’re just drawn to her. She’s incredible in that role. She very much drove, I understand, the idea of doing a Birds of Prey movie. That’s why she’s a producer on it. She developed that idea with Christina Hodson, the writer, so I think she really does have ownership of it. James wrote the script without talking to any of the actors. And when she read it, she had a couple of really good thoughts that — none of them were big story stuff, but just things that made Harley Harley, for her. I think she does feel a sense of pride and ownership in how that character has evolved. Because I saw Squad and I saw Birds… It feels different than either of those movies, how she approaches it, but essentially it’s grounded in the same place for her. She looks a little different, feels a little different, [her] wardrobe is definitely different, but I think you really recognize the Harley that you love from it. She’s a f-cking crazy girl, and I think you really feel it in this. And I think James wrote to it, for my money, in the best fashion that it could possibly be. I love her character in this movie.”

The Suicide Squad is set to be released both in theaters and on HBO Max on August 6th.