Joker actor Jared Leto denies gifting Harley Quinn actress Margot Robbie a dead rat during their time together on Suicide Squad. Leto infamously sent his co-stars Joker-like gifts during the making of the DC Comics movie — including used condoms and anal beads, if Leto’s 2016 interview with E! is to believed — but Leto’s present for Robbie was a living rat named Rat Rat. Robbie told Elle in 2015 that she kept the rat as a pet because “if Harley got something from Joker, she’d probably cherish it,” referring to the Joker-obsessed psychiatrist-turned-costumed criminal.
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“I never gave Margot Robbie a dead rat. That’s not true,” Leto clarified in a recent interview with GQ. A Vegan, Leto added he “actually gave her [food]. I found this place in Toronto that had great vegan cinnamon buns, and that was a very common thing.”
Explaining his gifts to the cast in 2016, Leto told E!, “I did a lot of things to create a dynamic to create an element of surprise, a spontaneity and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there. The Joker is somebody who doesn’t really respect things like personal space or boundaries.”
Along with Robbie’s rat and a set of bullets for Will Smith, who played the never-misses assassin Deadshot, Killer Croc actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje received “sticky Playboy magazines.” The entire cast was given a dead pig that was “a good gift because it had the effect of unifying us as a group because then it became us against him,” Akinnuoye-Agbake said at the time. “We sent the messenger back with the dead pig and our own personalized message. It got the ball rolling.”
Smith said Leto “went full Joker” for the David Ayer-directed ensemble about a team of conscripted criminals, adding, “He really set the tone. He wasn’t playing with it. He was dead serious as an actor. He was going in and he was 100 percent going into this character.”
Leto briefly reprises his Suicide Squad role for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, where he appears opposite Ben Affleck’s Batman. The Joker actor is not in The Suicide Squad, director James Gunn’s DCEU entry that is more reboot than sequel.
Ahead of his Marvel Comics role in Sony’s Morbius, Leto expressed support for a Suicide Squad director’s cut and told Variety that he is open to reprising the Joker role after his return to the DC Extended Universe in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, out March 18 on HBO Max.
