When James Gunn got the job of making a new Suicide Squad movie, he was given carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to with the film. He could use whatever characters he liked in the DCEU movie, film however he wanted, and cast whichever actor took his fancy. This must have been music to Gunn’s ears as he admitted that he’d always wanted to work with Idris Elba at a press conference attended by The Digital Fix.
“I wrote Bloodsport for Idris. I wanted Idris to star in this movie, so it wasn’t a matter so much of who the character was. It was a matter of let’s find a character who we can build as our own cinematic creation for Idris,” Gunn explained.
At that point, Elba joked that they’d actually discussed him playing Ratcatcher before deciding he was a better fit for the role of Bloodsport. Jokes aside, though, it was clear from the dynamic between the two that Bloodsport was a combination of what Gunn wrote in the script and what Elba brought to the role.
At one point Elba said during the costume fitting process they joked about the suit not fitting like it used to and they put this into the movie (although it seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor, unfortunately). The idea being that Bloodsport was slightly out of shape after spending however many years he got in prison for putting Superman in the ICU after shooting him with a kryptonite bullet.
Starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, and Peter Capaldi, The Suicide Squad is a sequel to the 2016 action movie of the same name and sees the team dispatched to the island of Corto Maltese to stop an evil general from getting his hands on something called Project Starfish.
The Suicide Squad hits cinemas here in the UK on July 30, 2021, and will arrive in the US on August 5.