Suicide Squad Director Reveals His Biggest Regret About Jared Leto's Joker
While Suicide Squad (2016) was pretty successful commercially, it did not leave much of impact on pop culture.
While the movie is still being talked about from time to time, unfortunately for it and the people involved in it, probably the most popular discussion point is a negative one – performance of Jared Leto as the Joker, and its inferiority to pretty much every other portrayal of the Joker on the big screen.
Performances by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger obviously were hard to match – but even after Suicide Squad's release Joaquin Phoenix joined the company of actors who did way better than Leto as the Clown Prince of Crime.
The director of the movie, David Ayer, still loves his creation dearly, and he defended most of his creative decisions.
But he has also admitted that there is one thing about Leto's Joker that he regrets, while also explaining the reasoning behind that thing. This version of the Joker has a facial tattoo saying "damaged".
And as Ayer recently posted on Twitter: "It was Joker trolling Batman after getting his teeth punched in by him. It's the one aesthetic choice I wish I hadn't made. Caught a lot of smoke for it obviously."
The conversation was caused by tweets highly disparaging of Leto.
Ayer even somewhat agreed that the character fell short, but attributed it to editing of the movie, which resulted in too much of the scenes involving the Joker getting cut and Leto not really getting enough time to shine:
"That's what happens when you hack a performance and character arc to pieces. I'm sorry that's all you were allowed to see. Now your mind is closed to the truth."
In fact, people also still talk about the large part of Suicide Squad which was left on the cutting floor, after Warner Bros. had their way with the movie.
Some fans, including John Cena (who played Peacemaker in 2021's Suicide Squad) even clamor for a release of Ayer's cut.
That is quite unlikely to happen, but now we wonder if Ayer is going to do something about the Joker's facial tattoo, if given free reign to create his own version of the movie.