Was that a real hyena in 'Birds of Prey'? Margot Robbie spills Harley Quinn's secrets
If you’re Gotham City hellraiser Harley Quinn, a dog is not your best friend.
A hyena is.
In “Birds of Prey,” Margot Robbie’s anti-heroine introduces us to her pet hyena, Bruce (a subtle nod to fellow Gotham resident Bruce Wayne), who acts like a razor-toothed puppy and eats Twizzlers a la "Lady and the Tramp." After adding Bruce the Hyena to the script, Robbie and screenwriter Christina Hodson realized they needed to find such a friendly hyena.
And, you know, there aren’t many.
“We thought it would be hilarious to have one of Harley’s hyenas in the film,” Robbie says, recalling their quest during preproduction. “Suddenly, everyone was like, 'What do we do? We can’t just have a hyena?!’ ”
Go on the set of 'Birds of Prey': Margot Robbie juggled jobs, migraines and the Joker
The group trekked out to meet a film-friendly hyena named Fonzi, but it was not meant to be. “We went to go visit him, but quickly learned that it was going to be near impossible to shoot with him the amount we needed,” Robbie says. “He was obviously very dangerous, and anything you gave him was his.” (In other words, it soon became shredded)
Director Cathy Yan says, “It didn’t make sense to have a real hyena on set and have Margot feed it Twizzlers."
But they didn’t want to rely on a fully computer-generated creature. The fix? Bruce was actually “two really lovely German shepherds,” Hodson says, then special effects took over.
Her hyena may be Hollywood trickery, but that really was Robbie doing a ton of stunts on roller skates.
“I do a lot of roller skating,” Robbie says. “I think everyone just assumed I’d be brilliant at it because I’d done ‘I, Tonya,’ " in which she played controversial figure skater Tonya Harding. "And it helped a lot, but it still is different. Making contact with other human bodies whilst on wheels proved to be more difficult than I anticipated.”
Remember the “Birds of Prey” fight scene that took place on a rotating carousel (with Robbie on skates)? It was no laughing matter.
“That was a really difficult day,” Yan says. “We’d have to do these long takes, and if we had one (actor) mess up, we’d have to start over. The women had to do the choreography over and over again to get it right. I was probably the most hated person after those two days."
It even wiped out the eternally jovial Robbie. "I remember asking Margot to do one more take, and she looked over me like, ‘Are you sure?’ ” Yan says.
"It was a tiny platform with a ton of bodies moving around," Robbie recalls, noting the carefully timed carousel scene was even tougher than one that had her chasing a runaway car on roller skates.
Hodson says, “I’ve never ever seen Margot that tired before.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Birds of Prey': Margot Robbie wanted a real hyena for Harley's pet
