"Look, I'm seeing it through Harley's eyes, and I go, 'F**k, what's wrong with wanting to f**k the Joker?,'" said costume designer Kate Hawley during a press visit to the Toronto set of Suicide Squad last summer. "I think, why can't it be like that? It should be like that."

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Suicide Squad Cosplayers 13 IMAGES

Deadshot (Will Smith) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) in Suicide Squad. (Credit: Clay Enos/ & © DC Comics, Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

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In order to bring these DC Comics icons to life in the upcoming film, Hawley and her fellow artisans explored what makes them tick, particularly the psychological and sexual elements of the mad love between the "amazing, charismatic" Joker (played by Jared Leto) and Squad member Harley Quinn (portrayed by Margot Robbie).The David Ayer-directed movie includes flashbacks that chronicle how psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel fell for her Arkham Asylum patient, the Joker, culminating in her chemical bath transformation into his pale-skinned love interest and cohort-in-crime, a sequence Hawley dubbed Harley's "Chemical Wedding" to the Joker."Everyone loves the naughty boy, and there's got to be some pathos and sympathy somewhere, because all those characters have a complexity," said Hawley.She likened the relationship between the Clown Prince of Crime and his shrink-turned-girlfriend to the dangerously dysfunctional romances depicted in Natural Born Killers and Sid & Nancy: "They can't bear to be apart. They can't bear to be together. It's a symbiotic relationship."Hawley finds the "interesting thing about them is almost both like alpha males in this relationship, and her part, I have to say, has been so beautifully written. She's got some of the best lines. You know, they're divided between seven of the Suicide Squad on that, but she very much comes across as a woman that can make her own choices and things like that -- because we've been very conscious as being a traditionally more female-dominated department, how she has a voice and there's still something women respond to and like and has the power, you know?""'I wanna f**k who I want when I want. I'm all under control.' In fact, the kind of line that we first started out with was, 'People like you need to f**k people like me,'" said Hawley.Hawley also revealed Harley is likely responsible for some of this Joker's already infamous tattoos: "What do these people do in the morning? And if anyone can imagine a daily routine in the Joker's life that's sort of slightly weird. But we're talking about, you know, if Harley and Joker were always trashed out of their heads or whatever, and I just imagined her scribbling on him while he was out of it one night."For her part, Harley Quinn actress Margot Robbie called DC Comics' version of Bonnie and Clyde "pretty wild," "crazy" and "messed up." As she told us during a break on set, "I've never seen scenes like it before, personally. It's next level. People better brace themselves. It's really. It's weird, they're a fascinating couple. Honestly, I find their stuff the most exciting out of everything. I'd watch a dialogue scene between them over, like, buildings blowing up and guns, which I love that stuff as well. But when they are just—or when they find someone that they wanna pick on, it's scary."As rigorous as her six weeks of physical training was, Robbie was particularly keen on wanting to grasp the psychological nature of Harley and Joker's relationship and why Dr. Harleen Quinzel would break bad for DC's most infamous villain."I was obviously really interested in all the parts of how she became Harley Quinn and how she ended up at Arkham, and why she wanted to be there," said Robbie, who read through various comics in preparing for the role. "I always like her romantic story lines because I'm a girl and I can't help it. But the things that I found most interesting were the parts where she had her big initial conversations with Joker and there's a couple bits throughout the comics where you do flashbacks and you see their first conversations and what they talked about and why. Because I just wanted to understand why was she attracted to him why does she love him?""I spent a lot of time trying to figure out their relationship," Robbie said. "It's kinda like when your friend is in, like doing something stupid in a relationship, and you're just so frustrated. You're like, 'What are you doing? Why are you doing that?' So it kinda feels like that when you watch it, when you're reading comics and Harley goes back to him. And you're just so frustrated. 'What are you doing?'"Robbie continued, "This is really important that I understand, and I want to do the things that she does. I need to really feel like that's how I would react in a situation. And I ended up landing upon codependency as the tact to take with that. And it turns out it's far more...It's like a compulsion, I suppose. It's kinda when you start looking at it the way an alcoholic is compelled, needs to have a drink. When you think of it in those terms, like it's an actual psychological problem, which codependency actually is, in really severe cases of codependency. So the more research I did, the more it made sense for me to behave the way she behaved."When we chatted with the film's producers, they likened Harley Quinn to Hannibal Lecter, another shrink-turned-villain who was masterful at getting inside people's heads. Robbie found tapping into that confrontational side upsetting."If there's ever tension, I try to diffuse the tension. And that's just a natural reaction for me. Where for Harley it's the complete opposite," Robbie explained. "And our director's really encouraged me to hone in on that aspect of her, because it's something doesn't come to me naturally. Or most people who wanna, like, not be involved in confrontation. But she feeds off that, so any opportunity in the rehearsal process where we did lots of improvising and stuff that's not even in the script but you end up delving into quite deep places. ... If Harley saw that they've shown a weak spot, she would like a little scorpion tail just like -- psst! -- get in there. And I felt so awful and so many times we did these scenes and I was just saying awful things. And seeing that someone's struggling with something in particular, and David's looking at me like, 'You better get in there, that's your window of opportunity right there, take it.' It feels really awful sometimes."However, adapting to that confrontational side and studying up on the psychiatric skills Harleen Quinzel would have came in handy when going toe-to-toe with the Oscar winner portraying the Clown Prince.As Robbie recalled, "Where it became most useful is we started doing rehearsals with Jared Leto who plays Joker, and he's a Method actor. So he's in character all the time. Because he's got his facade up all the time. It was really hard for me to get through to him at first, I felt. So I was like, OK, I really gotta take this you know, as if, I am trying to crack the Joker. And ended up looking into the MMPI testings they have. It's kinda like a test that psychologists use to determine what mental illness people might have. It's kinda like a list of 500 questions or more. I spent a lot of time reading those, and then whenever we had time to rehearse or improvise, or even in the scenes, I'd just start with those questions. Some of them are basic, and some of them are not. See which ones would catch him off guard, see how he'd react, and I'd be like, OK, I'm gonna go for this tact now. It's a lot of trial and error, but yeah, it was definitely interesting to do that side of things."Robbie also credited those who created Harley's look for the film in helping her fully inhabit the role: "Without all that hair and makeup, I wouldn't feel like the character at all. When I am all done up I don't look anything like myself, and I start behaving very differently, and it kinda does a lot of the work for you, I guess, with the whole getting into character side of things."Fans can finally see Harley and Joker's mad love realized in live-action form when Suicide Squad hits theaters next month.