Published
In 2017, one of the year’s small scoops broke: Enchantress would not be in the Suicide Squad sequel. Four years later the sequel arrived and proved it, and the page the news deserves now is the fuller one: what the role actually was, and what became of every name on the 2016 team sheet.
The dual role Delevingne actually played
Enchantress is two performances sharing one body. Dr. June Moone is a nervous archaeologist who touched the wrong idol in the wrong cave; the Enchantress is the several-thousand-year-old witch who steps out of her whenever the word is spoken. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) controls the witch by holding her heart in a briefcase — the film’s most literal image of its own premise, until the witch slips the leash, resurrects her brother Incubus, and spends the back half of the film as the villain the squad is deniably sent against. Delevingne, cast when her film career was two supporting roles old, plays Moone’s terror and the witch’s slink as two different physical registers; reviews were unkind to the character’s swirling-debris endgame, kinder to her.
The sequel that shed her
By mid-2017 the follow-up’s direction was already clear: Enchantress was out. What eventually shipped in 2021, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, kept exactly four of the 2016 cast: Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Joel Kinnaman’s Rick Flag, Viola Davis’s Waller and Jai Courtney’s Captain Boomerang. Will Smith’s Deadshot, the 2016 film’s biggest name, was replaced in function by Idris Elba’s Bloodsport. June Moone survived her own film, so a return was always technically available; no film used it, and the DC reboot that followed closed the continuity altogether. Delevingne’s later comment (that she would have come back if asked) is the whole epilogue.
The two squad members people keep asking about
The searches that reach this page after Enchantress are for the team’s two smallest-print names, and both deserve their answer written down.
Slipknot, played by Adam Beach, exists in the film to make the neck-bombs credible: he arrives with a one-line skill (“he can climb anything”) and no backstory scene (one was shot with a hostage-situation introduction and cut), and is detonated mid-escape as the demonstration that Waller does not bluff. Boomerang goading him into the attempt is the joke; the cut scene is why the joke plays so abruptly.
Katana (Tatsu Yamashiro, played by Karen Fukuhara in her first screen role) is the squad’s inversion: the only member who volunteers, minding Rick Flag with the Soultaker blade and a dead husband’s soul inside it. The film teases far more than it uses (a planned spin-off never advanced), and Fukuhara’s actual stardom arrived on television as The Boys’ Kimiko. Her character walked out of the franchise the same way Enchantress did: unmentioned, undismissed, simply never called again.
Where this leaves the 2016 film
Suicide Squad remains the odd artifact of the DC era, a critical failure that won an Academy Award (makeup and hairstyling), launched Robbie’s Harley Quinn into two further films, and left more loose ends than any comic-book film of its decade. The sequel answered them by declining to. That pattern, an announced direction quietly replaced by silence, is the exact species of non-event this site’s sequel tracker was built to record, and the Ayer Cut campaign that still petitions for a restored version belongs on the same shelf. The complete billed 2016 cast, from Smith and Leto down to the roles the film barely kept, is in the table below; Margot Robbie’s other pairing with Will Smith has its own file.