Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) features two prominent characters from the Birds of Prey comics, Huntress and Black Canary. Huntress' portrayer, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, analyzed her character, explaining why the film chose to go in a bit of a comedic direction with the classic DC heroine.

In an interview with Collider, Winstead broke down the character, saying, "The screenwriter and Cathy kinda narrowed down the backstory because there's a bunch of different iterations of Huntress and Helena so our version is Helena Bertinelli, who is the daughter of this mafia boss and comes from that world and witnesses her family being murdered in front of her when she's eight years old. So that's like an incredible backstory to come with from the beginning. That's some intense childhood trauma that you never get over and it really just becomes her entire identity, carrying out this revenge plot against the people who did this to her family."

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She also revealed why she and the writers wanted to inject a little humor into Helena's arc. She said, "And she meets all these women and kinda...getting to look at the comics and see how her personality manifests in the banter there and also, you know...her anger, how that bubbles over. What we played with in the movie was how that could be kinda funny and kinda odd. She's not socialized, she was raised away from everybody, she was raised to be an assassin. She wasn't raised to be somebody's friend. She doesn't really know what that is. So that was fun, we did a lot of improv with that to bring out Huntress' endearing quirks underneath all that rage and pain."

Directed by Cathy Yan from a script by Christina Hodson, Birds of Prey: And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn stars Margot Robbie, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rosie Perez, Ewan McGregor, Ella Jay Basco, Steven Williams, Derek Wilson, Dana Lee, Francois Chau, Charlene Amoia, Chris Messina and Matthew Willig.

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