Yesterday, David Ayer released the first full image of the Suicide Squad cast. The ensemble cast features the likes of Will Smith as Deadshot, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, and Jared Leto as The Joker. Up until fairly recently, Tom Hardy was on board to play Rick Flagg, the leader of the Suicide Squad.
Hardy has since been replaced by Joel Kinnaman and according to a recent conversation the actor had with Collider during the press day for Mad Max: Fury Road, he had to leave the project due to schedule conflict and got pretty bummed about it:
“Warner Bros. is my home studio and I love them so I was really bummed out. I wanted to work on that and I know the script is really f*cking alley and I also know what’s gonna happen with The Joker and Harley Quinn in that; I won’t give away too much…it’s f*cking alley. And that whole territory is something that I would certainly—I mean, everybody loves The Joker. Everybody loves The Joker. Will Smith is a dope guy, but everybody loves The Joker and that’s gonna, I think, be a very important film for fans.”
Hardy continued explaining the ultimate reason he left the film and it has everything to do with the overrun production schedule for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film The Revenant:
“There’s a very practical element as to why I’ve missed out on that foray, which is because Alejandro [G. Inarritu] has overshot by three months in Calgary, so we’ve got to go back out to Patagonia or Alaska to continue shooting The Revenant which has turned into a much bigger beast than we thought, but that also looks exceptional…
“It would have smashed the two, I would’ve had a beard. It was just not gonna happen so I got ass-slammed technically out of Suicide Squad, gutted, so I had to hand it over to Joel Kinnaman, who will do an amazing job.”
While Hardy is missing out on the chance to play Rick Flagg on the big screen, the actor is bringing Max Rockatansky back to cinematic life. That’s got to count for something.
(Via Collider)
