Star Idris Elba says that when he signed on to play Bloodsport in The Suicide Squad, he never wanted to replace Will Smith’s Deadshot from David Ayer’s 2016 film, Suicide Squad.
After the events of Suicide Squad, Smith’s character was set to rejoin the team, alongside Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag. However, when Smith chose not to return, Elba was cast in an unknown role which set rumours flying about him taking over the Deadshot character for the second adaptation. Of course, these rumours proved to be false.
In a recent interview with ET, Elba said:
Those rumors would be natural because Will said he wasn’t joining the second movie, so it was quite natural for audiences or fans to think that I would be taking over the Deadshot character because the Deadshot character lived in the other movie. But I’m really satisfied that James didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to do that. Deadshot is a great character and Will slays it, so I was really keen the audience and fans kept that rumor going.
Deadshot and Bloodsport do share some similarities, their aggressive villainous names being one of them, they are both assassins with a difficult relationship with their respective daughters, and they each each make it rain bullets. They’re also forced to be part of the Suicide Squad… but everyone on the team is.
Even with these similarities, Elba and Smith played the characters so vastly differently from each other, that theyclearly felt like completely different characters… as they should.
As Elba stated, the plan was for Bloodsport to become the new team marksman, but not for Elba to replace Smith as Deadshot.
The Suicide Squad is currently in theaters and available to stream on HBO Max.
Source: ScreenRant
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