David Ayer Explains The Joker's "Damaged" Tattoo and How It Relates to Batman

With so little of Jared Leto's Joker appearing in Suicide Squad, audiences didn't really have a chance to dig into his character very much. I have to admit, I wasn't super impressed with what we saw in the final cut: he just seemed like a two-bit gangster instead of a criminal mastermind. To be fair, a ton of his scenes were left on the cutting room floor, and maybe if we would have been able to see all of it, his performance would have registered much more.

It sounds like at least one aspect of the character had some interesting backstory to it, even though it didn't end up in the movie. In an interview with Empire (via ScreenCrush), writer/director David Ayer explains the origins of The Joker's "Damaged" tattoo on his forehead, which he says is the Clown Prince of Crime's message to The Dark Knight:

“Joker killed Robin and Batman basically smashes his teeth out and locks him up in Arkham Asylum. It’s in the asylum where Joker would have done the ‘damaged’ tattoo as a message to Batman saying, ‘You’ve damaged me. I was so beautiful before and now you’ve destroyed my face.’ That’s where the grill comes from."

Aside from the teeth smashing part, that would have actually been cool to see in one of the movie's incessant flashbacks. Plus, it might have given us a moment in which this version of Batman and The Joker actually act opposite each other in the same shot for the first time (as it is in the movie, we see a car chase between them and that's it). Maybe Ben Affleck is saving that scene for his solo movie?

Also worth pointing out here is that Ayer straight up says Joker was the one who killed Robin, but he doesn't go into details about exactly how that was done. The line in the movie actually says that Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn was an accomplice in Robin's murder, so maybe she escaped from the scene of the crime. Again, that's possibly something we could see in another movie down the line, but it might have been nice to further flesh out some of these characters in Suicide Squad instead of leaving Leto as basically a superfluous cameo.