The DCU Needs To Keep This Character

The Big Picture

• James Gunn might be changing the DCEU, but there’s one character and actor he should keep moving forward: Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn.
• Harley Quinn has always been a popular character who struck a lasting chord with fans, and Margot Robbie’s portrayal has only made her even more popular.
• Robbie, who’s on top of the world after Barbie as an actress and filmmaker, perfectly embodies Harley in live action, bringing a mix of independence, vulnerability, and empowerment to the role.

The release of James Wan‘s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom marks the end of the live-action DCEU. Well, the conclusion of its first incarnation, that is. New cinematic shepherds James Gunn and Peter Safran have plans galore for their universe. Some upcoming stories, like Superman: Legacy, are taking the reboot method to heart by starting from scratch with new actors and new stories. Whether that will be the case for every actor who stepped into the boots of a Zack Snyder-verse DC superhero is still unknown. The problem with live-action DC was always its scattershot vision, not the performers bringing comic book icons to life. Almost every DC actor has something to recommend them. But if only one actor-character combination from Snyder’s DC can return, there’s no question who it should be: the one and only Harley Quinn, impeccably played by global superstar Margot Robbie.

Harley Quinn Has Always Been Popular

Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman induced a cultural fervor in 2017. It’s impossible to overstate how meaningful it was for a famous, beloved, and powerful woman superhero to assume her iconography on the big screen. Then came the unwise Wonder Woman: 1984, and the adoration fizzled. In this context, it’s the ferocious, cavalier vivacity of Margot Robbie’s ne’er-do-well Harley Quinn that’s struck a lasting chord. Doing so isn’t even new ground for the character, who immediately exploded in popularity and evolved almost transformatively beyond her conceptual beginnings.

At this point, Harley’s creative origin story is akin to legend. Unlike her counterparts, she didn’t come from comics. Writers Paul Dini and Bruce Timm co-created Harley as a “one-shot character” intended for “just one episode” of Batman: The Animated Series. The pair wanted to infuse some personality into the Joker’s (Mark Hamill) henchpeople. The idea of a woman appealed, partially inspired by the real-life mistresses of organized male criminals. The rest of Harley sprang from Arleen Sorkin‘s performance in the popular soap opera Days of Our Lives. Dini, Sorkin’s friend, saw her character in a jester’s outfit. The lightbulb lit and became Harleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn, the Joker’s girlfriend, who was just as deadly and twice as unpredictable as her sociopathic beau. Sorkin lent Harley her voice for her debut episode, “Joker’s Favor,” which aired in 1992. “When we got the rough footage for that first episode back,” Timm told The Hollywood Reporter, “and we saw her character actually moving in animation and paired up with Arleen’s voice and the personality they gave her, it was, ‘Oh wow. There’s something here’.”

From there, Arleen Sorkin, who tragically passed away in August 2023, shaped Harley’s development. Regarding her performance, “There’s a little bit of Adelaide from Guys and Dolls in Harley,” Dini told Digital Spy, “there’s a little bit of Judy Holliday, there’s a lot of Arleen in there. A snappy blonde but also kind of a bad girl.” Sorkin’s vital contributions earned her co-star’s praise, too. “In the script,” Mark Hamill tweeted in 2020, “she was just an unnamed Joker ‘hench-wench’ w/ no discernible personality. When Arleen began reading her lines in that unforgettable voice so poignant & full of heart I nearly fell off my chair! She brought SO much more than was on the page & a legend was born.” The producers of Batman: The Animated Series agreed. They wanted more; so did the fans.

Harley Quinn Has Never Been More Popular

The Harley of Batman: The Animated Series went over well enough for DC to make her a supporting character in the comic The Batman Adventures. After Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s Eisner Award-winning one-shot The Batman Adventures: Mad Love, which established her backstory, DC rolled out Batman: Harley Quinn, Gotham City Sirens, and the 2011 Suicide Squad series. A funny thing happened with the latter, according to former DC Comics’ co-publisher Dan DiDio: “The more we put her in the book,” he told Vulture, “the better the book did.” By 2016, Harley’s personal comic was a runaway success. DC President Jim Lee dubbed Harley as “the fourth pillar in our publishing line, behind Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.” That’s one heck of an honor, puddin’.

Flash forward to Margot Robbie’s three blockbuster appearances as the character, Max’s ongoing Harley Quinn animated series, the upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux, and Harley remains as prevalent as ever — if not more so than ever, thanks to Robbie’s spectacularly insightful, witty, and vulnerable work. The chance of seeing a Harley Quinn cosplay at a fan convention isn’t a chance, it’s an inevitability. Harley’s unique personality trait cocktail resonates with fans, especially women and the LGBTQIA+ community. Her appeal is different from traditional heroic figures and even other women villains. Oddly, she’s just as empowering (if, admittedly, morally ambiguous). As Dini observed to Digital Spy, “There’s something very, very liberating about Harley Quinn. Wonder Woman is out there very much defending the right and being strong and being a positive role model. Harley’s out there just having fun and acting up and doing whatever she does.”

Inside or outside the comic sphere, there’s simply no one like Harley Quinn. There’s no similar female character with the same level of recognition and affordable freedom, at least. From a marketing standpoint, James Gunn and Peter Safran including Robbie-as-Harley just makes sense. Harley guarantees eyeballs. Margot Robbie guarantees eyeballs. Given her starring appearance in Gunn’s version of The Suicide Squad, it wouldn’t even read like a cash grab. The natural opportunity already exists simply because Robbie is so inarguably this generation’s definitive Harley Quinn in every one of her multifaceted, glorious shades.

Margot Robbie Is on Top of the World

As of 2024, Margot Robbie has never been more on top of her creative game. Nor has she been a more ferocious earthquake within the ever-patriarchal film industry. The Hollywood Reporter named Robbie one of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Women of 2023. Barbie, which Robbie starred in and produced, was the year’s highest-grossing film, a certifiable cultural phenomenon, and earned wide critical acclaim. Years before Robbie personally pitched Barbie to Mattel, she co-founded the production company LuckyChap Entertainment with Josey McNamara, Sophia Ker, and her husband Tom Ackerley. Together, the three intend to level the playing field for women filmmakers. “We never started a company to be a starring vehicle for me or to be a platform for me to chase my dreams,” Robbie said in 2020. “It was really that we wanted to expand what female stories and female storytellers could do in this industry […] since my platform can also open some of those doors.”

Robbie has always put her money where her mouth is. LuckyChap co-produced Emerald Fennell‘s directorial Promising Young Woman and her follow-up Saltburn, as well as Boston Strangler, Netflix’s Maid, and Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. The latter was a “passion project” for Robbie, who wanted to fill a void with an all-women action movie. Christina Hodson scripted Birds of Prey; Cathy Yan directed. “This movie would not have gotten made at all without Margot Robbie’s passion and involvement,” Paul Dini said of Birds of Prey, “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.”

There’s another simple truth to behold: Margot Robbie is Harley Quinn. As Arleen Sorkin’s natural live-action successor, Robbie is synonymous with Robert Downey Jr. and Christopher Reeve in the category of “born to play this role.” Her Harley is wildly intelligent, constantly observant, joyous, goofy, colorful, loving, and lonely. She’s as innocently and enthusiastically enraptured by the natural wonders of the world as she is by a breakfast sandwich (which, to be fair, is also a world wonder). Just like her animated and comic counterparts, Robbie’s Harley is the sweetest devil. Devious, sly, accustomed to being underestimated, and even more accustomed to twisting that to her advantage, her Harley is more than capable of sadism. Her legs can snap a man’s neck with the same casualness of someone brushing their teeth, then rescue herself with John Wick-levels of prowess, half the effort, and all the blood-splattering fun.

Margot Robbie Is the Perfect Harley Quinn

Moreover, Robbie’s gift for mixing independence with vulnerability shines when the material grapples with Harley being a survivor of abuse. Harley might be unconventional and unpredictable, but she’s no less traumatized and no less able to free herself from her abuser’s shackles. She’s stunned and touched when people come to her rescue, and Robbie makes that heartbreaking. Few high-profile women characters are confronting that horrific reality through fictional means. So, maybe Harley will save the world on a Tuesday if she feels like it. What she will always do is protect kids and other women. “When I saw her running,” Dini said about Birds of Prey, “laughing hysterically, pushing a shopping cart full of Peeps, I said, “That’s my girl’.”

Robbie’s producing role on Birds of Prey likely allowed her the flexibility to shape Harley’s character after Suicide Squad, a corrective move James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad continued. Gunn wanted to facilitate Harley’s “growth coming from a very, very, very toxic relationship” and have her make “what are, for her, healthy choices.” Combine this understanding of what a Harley Quinn story demands, Margot Robbie’s power in the industry, her empathetic adoration for the character, and her commitment to doing Harley justice — for everyone involved, there’s nowhere to go with Harley Quinn but up. Failing to include her in the DCU’s future would be a fool’s errand, so long as it’s Margot Robbie behind that impish grin.

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is available to stream on Netflix.

Watch on Netflix