Not every supervillain can be Doctor Doom or The Joker. After all, their main job is to be beaten by a superhero in 32 pages or less. Still, James Gunn’s action movie The Suicide Squad proves that even the most obscure villains can do incredible things if given the right motivation.
Gunn seems to have gone out of his way to pick the most random villains to make up his new Squad, which primarily consists of C-D list characters that even the most dedicated comic reader would struggle to name. In fact, we know exactly how Gunn picked the members of The Squad for his DCEU movie because he admitted to it at a press conference we were at.
“Well, I selected all the characters in different ways. There were some characters like Harley who I wanted to put in the movie, there were characters I liked a lot and I liked the actors who played them,” Gunn said. “But then there were other characters, like Polka-Dot Man, and I really wanted to use a character who was thought of as a lame supervillain. So I literally put into Google ‘who is the dumbest supervillain of all time’, and Polka-Dot Man always came up near the top.”
Joking aside Gunn didn’t pick Polka-Dot Man just because he’s a dumb character, he did it because he thought it would be fun to take a character perceived as lame and “give him heart”, sort of like how he helped to redefine some of the Guardians of the Galaxy over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
We doubt that David Dastmalchian was too bothered by the news. He’d already admitted at this point that he didn’t have a clue who Polka-Dot Man was when James first asked him to be in the film.
“The truth of the matter is I was very embarrassed because when James told me he wanted me to be in his film, I first freaked out,” Dastmalchian confessed. “I couldn’t believe I was going to be in a film James was going to make, let alone the Suicide Squad, but when he said Abner Krill I was like ‘ugh and he said ‘Polka-Dot Man’ and I was so embarrassed because James knows I’m such a big comic book fan I’ve spent my life collecting comics and I had no freaking clue who Polka-Dot Man was.”
It’s unsurprising that Gunn put a character like Polka-Dot Man in The Suicide Squad. He admitted that when Warner Bros essentially gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to do with the comedy movie he felt it was important to take risks, and what’s riskier than putting a man who shoots explosive polka-dots in your film.