8 Little Known Nuances That Made Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn Awesome

7. She Lowered The Pitch Of Harley's Voice Compared To Animated Portrayals

Harley Quinn's distinctive high-pitched voice and working class New York accent are one of the character's most distinctive traits, and have been present across pretty much every single prior portrayal of Harley in animation and video games.

But with Suicide Squad's grittier tone, Robbie had to find a way to ground the character's vocal register and make Harley seem a little less cartoonish.

This involved Robbie experimenting with the pitch of her voice until she found a happy medium that sounded more "realistic" but still delivered what fans expected to hear. She said of the process:

"The voice took a while because I knew it was something we’d have to commit to. It’s really high pitched. It’s really fun in that comic-book heightened reality kind of way, but it’s not very fitting for a David Ayer film. There’s going to be a lot of dark, gritty, serious scenes. From the comic books, I knew that she originated from Brooklyn. But David didn’t want it to be full Brooklyn like I did in [The Wolf of Wall Street]. It took a while to find the right level of pitch. The goal was to kind of find some sort of middle ground where I could go higher for comical moments and go lower for more real moments."

Better still, Robbie found a most unexpected vocal influence for the character's final sound, by watching Lorraine Bracco's scenes as mobster's wife Karen Hill in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas.

"[Bracco is] nuts in some scenes, completely crazy, but it’s never a high-pitched crazy doll voice. It comes from a very real, deep, primal place. My spectrum goes from Lorraine Bracco to animated Harley, and it’s just a roller coaster between those two throughout the film."