Margot Robbie Reveals Matt Reeves Stopped ‘Birds of Prey’ From Featuring Penguin: “So We Swapped It”

From femme fatale to romantic leading lady, Margot Robbie finally got a chance to work with Colin Farrell.

Before her A Big Bold Beautiful Journey co-star’s tenure as Oswald Cobblepot, the 3x Oscar nominee almost went toe-to-toe with the DC supervillain when she starred as Harley Quinn in director Cathy Yan‘s Birds of Prey (2020).

“The first draft that Christina [Hodson] wrote of Birds of Preythe villain was the Penguin,” she told Farrell in an interview for Entertainment Weekly. “And then [The Batman director/writer] Matt Reeves said, ‘Don’t use the Penguin. I’m going to use him in my thing.’ And so we swapped it to Black Mask [played by Ewan McGregor].”

After she last appeared as Harley in James Gunn‘s The Suicide Squad (2021), the DC Studios boss recently said that Robbie’s future as the character will be “revealed down the line.”

Premiering last month in theaters, Gunn’s Superman launched a new DCU with the ‘Gods and Monsters’ phase, separate from Reeves’ ‘Batman Epic Crime Saga’, which includes The Batman (2022) and last year’s HBO Max series spin-off The Penguin.

After Gunn previously defended the delays on The Batman Part IIwhich is set to premiere on Oct. 1, 2027 following a year-long postponement, Reeves and co-writer Mattson Tomlin revealed in June that they finished the script for the sequel.

In a letter to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders this month, the studio confirmed that production will begin on The Batman Part II in the spring.