Jared Leto Clears up Margot Robbie 'Rat' Story from 'Suicide Squad'
Jared Leto's time as the Joker became better known for his behind the scenes antics than his [...]
Jared Leto's time as the Joker became better known for his behind the scenes antics than his actual portrayal of Gotham's Prince of Crime in Suicide Squad, but he's setting the record straight on one of the stories. He cleared up a rumor in a video for GQ, clarifying that he did not in fact gift Margot Robbie, the Harley Quinn to his Joker, with a dead rat.
"I never gave Margot Robbie a dead rat," he explained. "That's not true. I actually gave her — I found this place in Toronto that had great vegan cinnamon buns, and that was a very common thing." Robbie originally told the story about the rat on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, but she never said that it was a dead rat.
"At first I thought this was disgusting. But then after that...I was like, I'm not going to kill him," Robbie told Fallon. "So I ended up keeping him as a pet. I ended up getting him like a sweet little playpen, a slide, a hammock, and a leash because I wanted to take him to set and walk him around... But then our landlord at the place I was staying found out." The rat ended up going to live with director Guillermo del Toro, so the rodent ended up having a happy ending.
Somewhere along the way, the story got misinterpreted to being about a dead rat. However, Leto does not disprove the other unsavory gifts that he gave to his Suicide Squad castmates, including used condoms and anal beads. "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," Leto told E! at CinemaCon in Las Vegas in 2016. "The Joker is somebody who doesn't really respect things like personal space or boundaries."
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Viola Davis also revealed that Leto sent the cast a dead pig. "The henchman came in with a dead pig and plopped it on the table and then he walked out. And that was our introduction to Jared Leto," Davis told Vanity Fair. "Now I'm terrified just as a person thinking 'Is he crazy?' But the second part was, 'Oh shit, I've got to have my stuff together'. You talk about commitment. And then he sends Margot Robbie a black rat, that was still alive in a box. She screamed, and then she kept it." Leto will appear as the Joker once again in Justice League: The Snyder Cut, which hits HBO Max on March 18.