Director James Gunn has revealed on Twitter that auditions for The Suicide Squad’s Ratcatcher 2 part involved real live rats. Besides posting pictures of actress Daniela Melchior chilling with some rats on the day she got the part, Gunn also disclosed the name of a couple of The Suicide Squad’s rodent characters, one of them baptized in homage to Guardians of the Galaxy’s Star-Lord Chris Pratt.
For Ratcatcher 2’s part, Gunn auditioned “hundreds of actors from across the world," most of them men. As Gunn tells it, Melchior "ended up being one of 3 actresses to screen test - a test which included making sure she was ok chilling with rats.” Gunn already revealed The Suicide Squad uses many practical effects, so it’s not exactly a surprise that real rats were used to make Ratcatcher 2 powers more grounded. What’s curious, though, is that some of the rats showed are characters with their own names.
While many rats were used in filming The Suicide Squad, two rodents will actually get credit in the upcoming film for giving life to Sebastian, Ratcatcher 2's main companion — Jaws and Crisp Ratt, the latter of which is also obviously inspired by a certain Guardians of the Galaxy actor.
In the Twitter thread, Gunn revealed he owned domesticated rats when he was a child, defending the rodents as the perfect pets. In Gunn’s words, rats are “much more friendly, playful & intelligent than gerbils & hamsters & much less likely to bite!” Gunn also compared domesticated rats to dogs, stating that “they’re about as different from wild rats as dogs are from wolves.” Gunn underlined that “the rats we used in the movie were as wild-looking as tame rats can be” to keep things interesting.
Even if Gunn’s The Suicide Squad has many characters, it seems like there’s a lot of thought put into every detail of the movie. This is impressive, considering that most of the film’s cast is set to die, according to Gunn himself.
Gunn’s R-rated The Suicide Squad will be released in theaters and available for streaming on HBO Max on August 6. Check out Gunn's tweet thread below: