For the cast of the upcoming Suicide Squad, behaving badly was highly encouraged.
As the actors behind the infamous DC Comics antihero team, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto and a handful of more famous faces were tasked with getting in touch with their naughty sides to bring their mischievous characters to life. In the film, the team of super villains are recruited by the government to fight something even more evil than they are in exchange for mercy. In the process, their individual talents come into play—skills that the group of stars tried to tap into behind the scenes.
For Jared Leto, the film's iconic Joker, that meant planning some unforgettable adult pranks on his co-stars, including mailing anal beads and used condoms. Margot Robbie, who plays his partner-in-crime, Harley Quinn, was specially gifted a live rat.
"I did a lot of things to create a dynamic to create an element of surprise, a spontaneity and to really break down any kind of walls that may be there," the Oscar winner told E!'s Marc Malkin. "The Joker is somebody who doesn't really respect things like personal space or boundaries."
However, his on-screen love interest opted to get into her own playful mood with the help of a personal tattoo gun. Robbie gave most of her co-stars matching purposefully misspelled tattoos—"SKWAD" on each person's forearm. However, as she told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show, when she was doing the first print on a cast assistant named Simon, she accidentally fudged the spelling even further, writing "SWAD" by accident—not that Harley would ever care.
Jai Courtney, who plays the grungy and mouthy assassin Boomerang, opted for a hallucinogenic approach to his prep. "That night I happened to eat some mushrooms," the actor reportedly told Empire of an evening Skype call with director David Ayer."I did self-inflict some burns."
As for his patchy haircut, he can blame the director. "David just walked right in, picked up some clippers and started shearing chunks of hair off my head," he told the magazine. "Eventually he said, 'You look like bad news.' Then he left."
Ayer made many requests of his cast, though none of them were as physically risky as the one he granted Cara Delevingne, who plays the film's Enchantress. "There still wasn't a script, but David asked me to go and try and find a forest and, if it was a full moon, get naked and walk through the woods with my feet in the mud, which I did," she told W magazine. "There wasn't a full moon, but I howled like a wolf. It would have been really funny if someone had seen me."
Other preparation was solely visual. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the man behind the Killer Croc, studied real crocodiles to adopt their deadly style of movement. But, to really get him in the zone, there was one video in particular that he revisited every day on the set. "I have it right on my phone. It's a Japanese cannibal…Issei Sagawa, who ate a French model. As sick as it sounds, the moment I start to play that video, I'm in the form of Croc, because it's really important for this creature to be thirsty for flesh, even when he's around The Squad," he told Screen Rant.
Rounding out the group, Joel Kinnaman, who plays field leader Rick Flag, got to know people who could have been in his character's shoes.
"I spent a lot of time with some tier-one operators, former CIA operatives and also Delta Force operators," he told Yahoo. "These are the kind of guys that could have been a Rick Flag. They've done some things that I'm sure keep them up at night, and they lost a lot of friends. They've also done a lot of good, but at the same time, maybe they haven't been thanked for it."
Perhaps the Suicide Squad will finally do some good—we'll all just have to wait until Aug. 5 to find out.