Margot Robbie is sick of playing someone’s girlfriend, but lucky for her, playing villains is becoming her thing. Her skills at playing evil will be put to the ultimate test when Suicide Squad drops next month, and she’ll reprise her role of Harley Quinn in some sort of top-secret DC project. In the meantime, she’s taking on more evil-adjacent work. According to Variety, Robbie will star in and produce Universal’s upcoming action thriller Bad Monkeys, which is based on a novel of the same name by Matt Ruff.
Bad Monkeys is centered on Jane Charlotte (Robbie) who, like Harley Quinn, is a little more complicated than just your typical baddie. In fact, when Jane’s arrested for murder, she purports that she’s actually a part of a secret organization that combats evil. Jane claims she works for the verbosely titled Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons—otherwise known as “bad monkeys.” Her confession isn’t taken all that seriously, and she’s locked away in the jail’s psych ward, where she’s endlessly questioned and probed by law enforcement trying to figure out if she’s crazy, lying, or telling the truth. We propose a fourth possibility: Jane is under the impression that she is the comic-book villain Harley Quinn. Seriously, this Bad Monkeys description is sounding an awful lot like Suicide Squad. Robbie loves to play crazy, and she does it well. Neither Jane nor Harley, however, are as horrifying and insane as the sexist Vanity Fair profile of Robbie.