[The following contains spoilers for The Suicide Squad]
There’s a point in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad where Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie, reprising her role from the first Suicide Squad and from Birds Of Prey) is captured and tortured by bad guy soldiers. She kills the torturer pretty quickly, because she’s Harley Quinn and murdering people should be no problem for her at this point, but then she does something even more impressive: In one fluid motion, Harley grabs a handcuff key from the goon’s corpse with her feet, then twists backward to put the key in the lock and free herself. It’s the kind of acrobatic trick that you’d expect an evil clown to pull off, but in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gunn revealed that it’s apparently also the kind of trick that non-evil Australian woman Margot Robbie can pull off, because she actually did that move. (Gunn points out that her face is covered, so you might not believe it, but he insists that it’s really her doing that painful-looking twist.)
That’s probably the most surprising revelation from Gunn in the THR interview, but it’s not the only one. For starters, Gunn said that Harley’s little sidequest was originally a bigger part of the movie, so he started to cut it down while editing because he didn’t want to end up “pushing audiences away” by diverting attention from the action. Also, while editing, Gunn said he was “a little surprised” by how violent the movie ended up being—which makes us wonder how closely he was paying attention while filming that scene of Peacemaker and Bloodsport clearing the camp, because that one’s pretty damn violent. Elsewhere in the chat, Gunn mentions that his boss over at Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige (who is, of course, a producer on Gunn’s Guardians Of The Galaxy movies), visited the set of The Suicide Squad during production and happened to be there when they first showed off surprise villain Starro The Conqueror. That means it’ll be Gunn’s fault if Marvel ends up ripping him off by throwing a mind-controlling starfish into Shang-Chi or the next The Eternals.
Really, though, Gunn’s favorite thing to talk about seems to be Margot Robbie. He said she’s “probably my favorite actor I’ve ever worked with,” because she’s able to do so much with Harley Quinn and her and John Cena are two people who “don’t have a chip on their shoulder.” Gunn also said that he was able to sort of “become Harley” while writing for the character, and he referred to it as a “terrible, wonderful place to be.” THR suggested that he should just make a Harley Quinn solo movie, but he dodged that question while also hinting that he wouldn’t necessarily hate to keep making comic book movies—even if they’re “kind of comic book movies” that aren’t just “from comic books.”