A farewell to arms
Actor Fillion labels Javelin the most useless member of The Suicide Squad
When Nathan Fillion got the call from filmmaker James Gunn asking him if he wanted to join The Suicide Squad, it was a no brainer.
The pair had built a friendship working together on past projects like 2006's horror Slither and 2010's black-comedy Super. Fillion also had bit parts in Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel.
The only thing was, when Gunn said he was going to be joining the villainous Squad as TDK, Fillion thought that meant The Dark Knight — a.k.a. Batman. Alas, TDK stands for The Detachable Kid.
“Was I disappointed? I don't want to say yes, but it wasn't what he said it was going to be,” Fillion laughs in a video call.
Long fascinated with superhero films, Fillion says his role in The Suicide Squad was a chance for him to jump headfirst into the genre.
“Every time one of these superhero movies comes out, you think, `There's one more superhero I will not be playing.' But every superhero has about 150 villains and apparently it's OK to kill them. So this is a great way to go.”
In Gunn's retooled Suicide Squad, Fillion's soda-swilling TDK appears alongside a roster of D -list supervillains recruited for a mission to destroy a Nazi-era prison and laboratory that houses an absurd alien starfish named Starro.
“With just a handful of A-holes, how do you destroy that?” he asks.
Not having appeared in any prior comic books, Fillion, 50, laughs at TDK'S goofy powers, which see his arms popping off when it comes time for the Squad to battle the even badder guys.
“He has powers that are not really powerful and I think those powers lead to his downfall,” Fillion says. “He suffers from overconfidence. That guy thinks he belongs on the A-team of crack commandos and he does not belong on the A-team of crack commandos. That guy's a liability and he doesn't know it. That's a problem.”
But even though his co-stars Margot Robbie (Harley Quinn) and Joel Kinnaman (Rick Flag) labelled TDK the most “useless” member of the Squad with a “very punchable face,” Fillion — whose hometown agreed for this weekend to call Edmonton City Hall the Nathan Fillion Civilian Pavilion — thinks there's someone even worse.
“It's Javelin,” he says. “At least Captain Boomerang 's boomerangs come back. (Javelin) has one throw and then it's over. He's got one shot, but we don't need a one shot. We need someone who can give us at least four or five shots.”
After DC'S first go-round with the Suicide Squad in 2016 was a critical failure, Fillion thinks the bloody tone of the new film works best because of new characters played by Idris Elba, Jon Cena, Sylvester Stallone, newcomer Daniela Melchior and others. The fact that Gunn is the one guiding the project is just the icing on the cake.
“James has never let us down. Look at the body of work James has given us,” Fillion challenges. “And you see what happens when people hand it to him and take their hands away and say, `Knock it out of the park.' We can trust in James. We can.”