How The Suicide Squad (don’t forget the The) helps with phobias.
Daniela Melchoir plays Ratcatcher 2 in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad
It occurred to me, driving home from a screening of The Suicide Squad last week, that superhero movies are doing a great job of helping audiences deal with their phobias. Whether you fear spiders (black widows or just the generic kind), bats, ants, panthers, raccoons or even talking trees, there’s an action-adventure tale to help normalize the critter.
Adding to the pantheon is DC’S newest, The Suicide Squad, which features a sentient weasel, a walking shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone) and Daniela Melchoir as Ratcatcher 2, who can befriend rats and also control them.
“I actually auditioned for this role and in the audition I had to have a chemistry test with the rat,” says the Portuguese actress. “I just had one in my hand, suddenly he was in my hoodie, James was already taking pictures. Then I found myself booking the role. Not because I was friendly with the rat — I guess?”
Melchoir is part of the sprawling cast that inhabits James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, which the writer/director insists is in no way a strike back at the critically reviled (but box-office hit) Suicide Squad from 2016.
“This was going to be me telling The Suicide Squad, whether that version exists or not,” he says. “It’s not a reaction to something else. There’s a lot of things that don’t work about that movie. There’s a lot of things that do work in that movie.”
He says the weird title was just a joke during production that somehow became canon, as they say. Gunn says he’ll consider my suggestion to call the next one A Suicide Squad. “It might just be The Suicide Squads,” he says with a laugh. “Or The The Suicide Squads! Or The Suicide Squad 2-slash-3.”
Melchoir sounds like she’d be down for another chapter, whatever it’s called. “It was really fun,” she says. “And I can’t wait to have rats with me again. They were rat stars, of course.”
Gunn is in a weird position, having now helmed major releases in both the Marvel and DC cinematic universes — not unlike the mind-blowing, spacetime-bending moment when J.J. Abrams found himself briefly astride both the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. Gunn insists it wasn’t really that hard to keep the projects separate.
“Every movie I do, I just fall in love with the characters and then I tell the biggest story I can,” he says. “Compartmentalizing and balancing the different franchises for me, it was really personal ethics where I just had to be up front with everybody when both things were going on.”
That meant regular meetings with Warner Bros. chair Toby Emmerich and Marvel’s chief creative officer Kevin Feige, especially during late 2018 and early 2019, a time that saw Gunn fired from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy 3 over some decade-old tweets, hired to write and direct The Suicide Squad, then rehired by Marvel after an outpouring of support from fans and Guardians cast members.
Gunn says the biggest differences between the two movies – The Suicide Squad is out now, while Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is due in May of 2023 – has to do with the audience. The Suicide Squad is R-rated, and it shows, with buckets of blood and gore on the screen. “With Guardians I’m writing something that needs to appeal to adults and children.”
He also says he’s not averse to making a smaller production. “I’ll do whatever interests me,” he says. “If there’s a story that interests me that can be told in a small way, I’ll 100% do that. But I do seem to gravitate towards explosions and things. I mean, I like the personal interaction and I like that next to a big explosion. I like the small, nuanced performances next to a giant walking starfish. I like both those things together. I think we can have it all with The Suicide Squad.”
Melchoir has been won over by Gunn’s methods, after honing her craft in a series of Portuguese telenovelas in the mid-to-late-2010s. “I don’t have that much experience, but I can say that I never entered a room that was just to explain what the movie is,” she says. “But when I went to the studio, James had this room full with everything, storyboards to costumes to pictures to what the sets would be and the places. About everything. I guess that’s what James does. He’s just an amazing human being. I was lucky to be his friend and his student.”
The scale of The Suicide Squad was sometimes a little extreme, she recalls. “It took a little bit of meditation during the rides from home to the studios. And because it was my first English movie ... sometimes I wouldn’t get the jokes. And I would just play with it and just keep in character. Or I would just play that I didn’t understand the joke. Which is great either way. And you guys will never know which case was which!”
In the audition I had to have a chemistry test with the rat. I just had one in my hand, suddenly he was in my hoodie, James was already taking pictures. Then I found myself booking the role.