| Harley Quinn | |
|---|---|
| DC Extended Universe character | |
 Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn inSuicide Squad (2016) | |
| First appearance | Suicide Squad (2016) |
| Last appearance | The Suicide Squad (2021) |
| Based on | |
| Adapted by | |
| Portrayed by | Margot Robbie |
| In-universe information | |
| Full name | Harleen Frances Quinzel |
| Title | Doctor |
| Occupation | |
| Affiliation | Suicide Squad |
| Significantothers |
|
| Origin | Gotham City, New Jersey, United States |
| Nationality | American |
Dr.Harleen Frances Quinzel, later known asHarley Quinn, is afictionalcharacter in theDC Extended Universe (DCEU), based on thecharacter of the same name created byPaul Dini andBruce Timm as acomic reliefhenchwoman for thesupervillainJoker in theDC Animated Universe (DCAU)animated seriesBatman: The Animated Series (1992–1995) and later adapted to theDC Universe. Portrayed by actressMargot Robbie, she first appears in film inSuicide Squad (2016), playing a major role, and also stars in thespin-off solo filmBirds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020) and standalone sequel filmThe Suicide Squad (2021).
She is first depicted asJoker's psychiatrist in prison, then later his lover and partner in crime, before going off on her own misadventures in her DCEU appearances. Her introduction sequence inSuicide Squad mentions her as an accomplice and directly responsible for the murder ofBatman's sidekickRobin. Robbie's portrayal of Harley Quinn has received widespread critical acclaim.
Harley Quinn was a late addition to the lineup ofDC Entertainmentsupervillains, making her debut in the 1990s as a love interest to theJoker inBatman: The Animated Series. Nonetheless, she has become one of DC's most popular characters, especially as she has become an additionalfoil to Joker's character aside fromBatman, and she later became a full-fledged character in the comics.[1] Though originating as a supervillain, Harley, much likeCatwoman, has been gradually developed as anantiheroine in later comic storylines.[2] She has appeared in numerous adaptations of DC Comics storylines, being voiced byArleen Sorkin in theDC Animated Universe (DCAU) and other actresses such asTara Strong andKaley Cuoco in theadult animated series based on the character.
Australian actressMargot Robbie was cast to portray Harley Quinn in theDC Extended Universe (DCEU), beginning with 2016'sSuicide Squad, first being offered the role in October 2014.[3] Robbie stated that it took three hours to prepare her hair, makeup and costume for the role and "at least 45 minutes" to take it off.[4] In addition,Joker actorJared Leto surprised Robbie by gifting her ablack rat during filming.[5][6] Despite her initial shock, Robbie kept the rat as a pet, according toAmanda Waller actressViola Davis.[7]
Following the financial success of the film,Warner Bros. announced a female-centered spinoff of the film which would eventually become 2020'sBirds of Prey, with Robbie reprising her role for that film and serving as a producer.[8] Robbie had pitched the film to Warner Bros. in 2015 as "anR-rated girlgang film including Harley, because I was like, 'Harley needs friends.' Harley loves interacting with people, so don't ever make her do a standalone film." Robbie felt it was important for the film to have a female director. While Warner Bros. andDC Films had various other Harley Quinn-oriented films in development,Birds of Prey was the only one with whose development Robbie was directly involved.[9]
Robbie reprised her role as Harley Quinn in 2021'sThe Suicide Squad, astandalone sequel to the 2016 film. She was one of four actors from the original film to reprise their roles.[10]
In an analysis of the character byThe Perspective, Harley Quinn is seen as both a ruthless villain undeserving of sympathy and a tragic character. While some of her deeds, such as murderingJason Todd with Joker and the lawyers that put her boyfriend in prison, torturingBatman, and robbing a store "just for fun" inSuicide Squad, are inexcusable, Harley is also constantly manipulated by Joker, with many of her crimes serving simply to get Joker to "love" her, a hallmark of one-sided, abusive relationships. In addition, Harley is arguablyobjectified in the film, with many of her outfits being extremely revealing.[11] While being interviewed on her role inSuicide Squad, Robbie described Quinn as one of the Squad's most manipulative members, and her relationship with Joker as "incredibly dysfunctional", adding that Quinn is, "mad about him—like, literally, mad. She's crazy. But she loves him. And it's a really unhealthy, dysfunctional relationship. But an addictive one."[12] David Ayer'soriginal version ofSuicide Squad would have shown more of Joker and Harley's abusive relationship and contrasted it with a budding, healthier romance with Task Force X teammateFloyd Lawton / Deadshot.[13][14]
Harley's portrayal inBirds of Prey was designed to further develop her character independently of the Joker's influence, as mentioned by screenwriterChristina Hodson.[15] Hodson called Harley the character she enjoyed developing most due to her unpredictable personality.[16] The film also reveals Harley was abandoned by heralcoholic father, has had malevolent tendencies even before her encounter with Joker, and that she has had her "heart broken by both men and women" in the film's introduction, confirming herbisexuality as in the original comics.[17][18]
Quinn has also been noted for her use of a baseball bat as a weapon throughout the films,[19] with some outlets even referring to it as a trademark of the character.[20][21] During the filming ofSuicide Squad, Robbie accidentally hit herself in the face with a prop baseball bat,[22] with the actress also keeping one of the bats after filming ended.[23] Quinn also fights with a mallet throughoutSuicide Squad.[24][25]
Harleen Quinzel was abandoned by heralcoholic father at a young age and frequently got in trouble with the law. She later became a psychiatrist and, as one of her first cases, works with theJoker (Jared Leto) during his incarceration inArkham Asylum. The Joker gradually seduces Quinzel and gets her to fall madly in love with him. He later persuades her to release him, subjecting her toshock therapy in retaliation for her using it on him, and manipulating her into jumping into a vat of the same chemicals that disfigured him to prove her love for him. The chemicals bleach her skin and dye her hair just as they did the Joker's, and drive her just as insane as he is. The duo become partners in crime and, asAmanda Waller (Viola Davis) puts it, the "King and Queen ofGotham City".
Harley and Joker carry out numerous crimes, such as murderingBatman's (Ben Affleck) protégé,Robin. Soon afterwards, Batman tracks down the couple in the Joker'sLamborghini, causing them to crash, and he captures Harley while Joker escapes.
Now imprisoned in an electrified cage at Belle Reve Penitentiary, Harley regularly antagonizes and attacks the prison guards. Waller recruits Harley and several other incarceratedmetahumans and criminals, includingDeadshot (Will Smith),Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney),Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje),El Diablo (Jay Hernandez), andSlipknot (Adam Beach), into a task force called theSuicide Squad after the U.S. government reluctantly gives her permission. The squad is quickly put to use after one of Waller's intended recruits,Enchantress (Cara Delevingne), goes rogue, and are put under the command ofRick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and his bodyguard,Katana (Karen Fukuhara). The squad's members do not get along at first and are reluctant to go along with orders until Slipknot is executed by a bomb planted in his neck for trying to escape.
The Joker discovers Harley's predicament and blackmails a prison guard into revealing her location, in addition to forcing anA.R.G.U.S. scientist to disable her bomb. Meanwhile, Harley bonds with Deadshot and annoys Flag with her antics while fighting Enchantress's minions in Midway City. The Joker then arrives in a helicopter to rescue Harley, but one of Waller's guards shoots down the chopper. Harley jumps out of the aircraft before it crashes, leading to the Joker's apparent death. After Waller is captured by Enchantress's minions and Deadshot discovers the true reason for the mission, the squad realizes they must face Enchantress and her brother Incubus (Alain Chanoine) alone and head to a bar to drown their sorrows. Flag reveals that Enchantress's human alter ego, Dr. June Moon, was his girlfriend prior to being possessed, and frees the convicts, but they decide to help him after bonding over drinks.
The squad locates Enchantress and Incubus at a partially flooded subway station. Killer Croc and severalNavy SEALs plant a bomb underneath Incubus, while El Diablo sacrifices himself to detonate it, destroying Incubus. Enchantress defeats the remaining squad members and entices them to join her in exchange for granting them their deepest desires; Harley's desire is for the Joker to settle down and start a family with her. Harley feigns interest in order to get close enough to cut out Enchantress's heart with Katana's sword, then aids Deadshot and Flag in defeating Enchantress and freeing June. Waller rewards Harley with 10 years off herlife sentence and anespresso machine. Shortly afterward, the Joker, who survived the crash, breaks into Belle Reve with his henchmen and frees Harley.
Four years after the events ofSuicide Squad, the Joker breaks up with Harley and leaves her in the streets of Gotham City. After she finds refuge with Doc (Dana Lee), a restaurant owner, she copes with the breakup by cutting her hair, picking uproller derby, and adopting aspotted hyena which she names afterBruce Wayne. After getting drunk at a bar and encounteringRoman Sionis / Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) andDinah Lance (Jurnee Smollett), the latter of whom rescues her from abduction, Harley goes toAce Chemicals to blow up the facility as a way to publicly announce her separation from the Joker.GCPD detectiveRenee Montoya (Rosie Perez) arrives at the scene while investigating mob killings, finding Harley's necklace and noting her vulnerability without the Joker's protection. Soon enough, Harley finds herself constantly under attack from people she and/or the Joker had wronged in the past.
Upon pickpocketCassandra Cain (Ella Jay Basco) stealing a diamond embedded with the account numbers to the fortune of the massacred Bertinelli crime family, Sionis kidnaps Harley and forces her to track down Cassandra in exchange for her life. Harley locates Cassandra in GCPD custody and breaks her out using a variety of fireworks, and the two later bond while hiding in Doc's restaurant. However, the apartment is bombed by a criminal resentful of Harley. Doc, who had been contacted by assassinHelena Bertinelli / Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) for information on Cassandra, tells Harley that he had sold her out for a large sum of money, forcing her to flee with Cassandra. Harley renegotiates her deal with Sionis, offering to turn Cassandra and the diamond (which the latter had swallowed) over in exchange for his protection and agreeing to meet at an abandoned amusement park.
After tying Cassandra up and having her ingest greasy food andlaxatives to try and extract the diamond painlessly, Harley is confronted by Montoya, who is building a case against Sionis, while Sionis's right-hand manVictor Zsasz (Chris Messina) arrives with Dinah, who had informed Montoya, in tow. Before Zsasz can inflict harm on Dinah and take Cassandra, Helena arrives and kills Zsasz, who was the last of her family's killers. Harley, Montoya, Helena, and Dinah have a standoff before more of Sionis's men arrive. Realizing they all have reasons to hate Sionis, the group decides to team up and defend themselves from Sionis's men using the weapons Harley had brought. Sionis captures Cassandra in the resulting melee and Harley gives chase on roller blades with help from Helena. As Harley confronts Sionis at a nearby pier, he prepares to kill Cassandra, who plants a live grenade in his jacket while he is distracted. Harley pushes Sionis off the pier just before the grenade explodes, killing him.
In the aftermath of destroying Sionis's criminal empire, Montoya quits the GCPD. Using the money within the accounts hidden inside the diamond, Helena joins with Dinah and Montoya in establishing a team of vigilantes called theBirds of Prey. Harley and Cassandra escape, selling the diamond itself to a pawn shop and starting their own business.
Some time after being re-incarcerated at Belle Reve penitentiary for crashing her car into a bank due toroad rage, Harley is sent with other inmates from Belle Reve to the South American island nation ofCorto Maltese after its government is overthrown by an anti-American regime. Under orders from Amanda Waller, in exchange for shortened sentences, the squad is tasked with destroying Jötunheim, a localNazi-era research facility tower that holds a secretive experiment known as "Project Starfish", which the new regime plans to weaponize it against other nations. The team, led once again by Colonel Rick Flag Jr. and consisting of Harley, Captain Boomerang,Brian Durlin / Savant (Michael Rooker),Richard "Dick" Hertz / Blackguard (Pete Davidson),Gunter Braun / Javelin (Flula Borg),Cory Pitzner / T.D.K. (Nathan Fillion),Mongal (Mayling Ng) and"John Doe" / Weasel (Sean Gunn), is almost entirely wiped out by the Corto Maltesean military upon landing, and Harley is taken prisoner by the local government. She is courted by the current Corto Maltesean dictator, Silvio Luna (Juan Diego Botto), who admires her "resistance to the American regime". Harley spends a romantic day with Luna and agrees to marry him, but after he reveals his intention to use Project Starfish to punish political dissidents, Harley, still haunted by her past dating mistakes and considering his willingness to kill children a "red flag", kills him. She is then put back into custody and tortured for interrogation.
Due to the first team being largely a decoy, a second team, both neither knew about, enters the country undetected and finds a recovered Flag among Corto Maltesean rebels, while Harley escapes the local government and reunites with Flag and the team, which includesRobert DuBois / Bloodsport (Idris Elba),Christopher "Chris" Smith / Peacemaker (John Cena),Nanaue / King Shark (voice ofSylvester Stallone),Cleo Cazo / Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior) and her pet rat Sebastian (voice ofDee Bradley Baker), andAbner Krill / Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian). The new squad captures Project Starfish's head geneticistDr. Gaius Grieves / Thinker (Peter Capaldi) and blackmails him to entering them into Jötunheim in exchange of sparing his life, where they encounter the said project's asset, thestarfish-like alien creature,Starro the Conqueror.
The team learns that not only has, for 30 years, the previous Corto Maltesean government been subjecting both its own citizens and political enemies to torture to death and tests by the alien, but that Starro was captured by American astronauts and that Thinker's experiments had been financed by the U.S. government after making a secret deal with the said previous regime, information Waller seeks to have buried. The team accidentally detonates the explosives early, damaging the tower, and Starro breaks out, kills Thinker, and begins to wreak havoc and control the island's population. After Peacemaker, who was secretly under orders by Waller to keep the information secret, kills a turned rogue Flag before being wounded by Bloodsport and left for dead, the team defies Waller's orders of leaving the island to fight the colossal alien. Harley pokes a hole in Starro's eye with a javelin previously bequeathed to her by a dying Javelin, allowing Ratcatcher 2's summoned army of the island's rats to chew Starro to death from the inside. The island is saved and the rebels take over, and Harley and her remaining teammates – Bloodsport, King Shark, Ratcatcher 2, and Sebastian – are airlifted to safety after Bloodsport blackmails Waller with the information of Project Starfish into releasing them all from prison and dropping his daughter Tyla's (Storm Reid) court trial. As they leave, Harley proposing to Bloodsport to become friends with each other, in honor of their late common friend Flag.
In a flashforward "Knightmare" scene to apost-apocalyptic reality, whereDarkseid (Ray Porter) and a mind-controlledSuperman (Henry Cavill) conquer Earth,[a] after Joker taunts Batman (who is reluctantly allied with him) about the deaths of his parents and Robin, Batman reveals that Harley had died in his arms and that she made him promise to "slowly kill" Joker, which he intends to do when he no longer has use for him. In a deleted scene, Joker asks Batman, "Who do you think screamed the loudest? The girl, or the boy?" in reference to both his and Harley's own murder of Robin and Harley's death, before laughing in Batman's face.
.jpg)
After the release ofSuicide Squad in 2016, Margot Robbie's performance as Harley Quinn was well received, with many critics considering her performance the film's biggest highlight and eager to see more of the character in future films.[26][27][28][29] Robbie's performance inBirds of Prey similarly received acclaim.Rotten Tomatoes summarized its review of the film: "With a fresh perspective, some new friends, and loads of fast-paced action,Birds of Prey captures the colorfully anarchic spirit of Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn."[30] In addition,Richard Roeper of theChicago Sun-Times wrote in his positive review of the film that "Robbie turns in a much richer and funnier and layered performance as Harley this time around, thanks in large part to the stiletto-sharp screenplay byChristina Hodson."[31]
After seeing Harley Quinn's design fromSuicide Squad for the first time before the release of the film, Bruce Timm said that she "looks actually pretty cute!",[32] while Paul Dini commented "It's a rougher, more street look. I think it works fine."[33] Later after its release, Dini talked about Robbie's portrayal of the character in the movie, saying "I thought Margot did a really terrific job and I loved all the nods to her origin such as the elements ofMad Love that were alluded to in the therapy session with her and The Joker, some of their relationship and of course the brief flash of her in the Bruce Timm costume as interpreted byAlex Ross in the dance sequence they did. I felt she had a really good sense of humour about capturing the character and there are moments where you see her mind is always working. She really captured the kinetic energy of the character. If anything, it proved to me that character has enough to support her own movie."[34]
OnBirds of Prey, Dini stated: "Oh I loved it. I thought it was great. I thought it was a blast. This movie would not have gotten made at all without Margot Robbie's passion and involvement, and she was campaigning for a Harley movie very strongly, I think before they even started shooting Suicide Squad. She recognized the value in the character and knew audiences were going to enjoy her in Suicide Squad. She and Christina Hodson worked together on it, and they brought inCathy Yan as the director. This was a passion project for all of them, and I think they really got the essence of the character down, and they made her quite a lot of fun and appealing in so many ways. She's not totally the animated version, and it's not totally theJimmy [Palmiotti] andAmanda [Conner] version, but it kind of borrows from all of them and creates its own reality and its own fun. There are so many moments in that movie that I just think are wonderful. Yes and sharing hair ties! [Laughs.] I have one wish from Birds of Prey: I hope everybody has someone in their life that gets looked at the way that Harley looks at her breakfast sandwich. She stares at it with abject adoration. At the [premiere] party Robbie asked, "Was there anything wrong in the movie?" I said, "It was the breakfast sandwich. It was so good I wanted to leave and have one. And I mourned its death." One other thing I said to her... When I saw her running, laughing hysterically, pushing a shopping cart full of Peeps, I said, "That's my girl." All those little impish things that she did in the movie—sitting down eating cereal, watchingTweety Bird cartoons, and just kind of skipping through life cheerfully oblivious of the devastation she's caused—that's Harley."[35]
The plot description and characterization were adapted fromBatman,Harley Quinn at the DC Extended Universe Wiki, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
| Supporting characters | |
|---|---|
| Teams | |
| Antagonists | |
| Publications | |
| In other media | |
| Related articles | |
| |||||||||
| Current members |
| ||||||||
| Notable former members |
| ||||||||
| Antagonists | |||||||||
| Film |
| ||||||||
| TV series | |||||||||
| Video game | |||||||||
| Related articles | |||||||||
| Films |
| ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TV series |
| ||||
| Music |
| ||||
| Cast andcharacters | |||||
| Other media | |||||
