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James Gunn has revealed his distaste for the stereotypical "perfect" female badass character trope.
"As a female, you don't always get to play very three-dimensional, complicated characters," Harcourt actor Jennifer Holland lamented on the latest episode of Peacemaker: The Official Podcast with James Gunn. "Either women are really mean and terrible or they're really nice, sweet and lovely. You [Gunn] add a lot of dimension to your characters."
"They're all people," Gunn offered. "There are differences between the sexes, obviously… but we're way more alike than different. When I came into [Hollywood], the female characters were always just perfect for the most part. As time went on, the quote-unquote 'female badass' started to occur. I also fucking didn't necessarily like that because they weren't badasses like Star-Lord's a badass or Deadpool's a badass. They didn't have personalities. They were still perfect badasses. So, being able to allow flaws in those characters was, to me, the coolest thing you could do."
While there have certainly been scores of fascinating, flawed 'badasses' down the years – the likes of Ripley, Sarah Connor, and Trinity all say hello – there also existed a growing trend of the sort of 'perfect' characters Gunn refers to from the 2000s onwards.
Gunn, for his part, has always moved away from stereotypes for his roles. Peacemaker's Harcourt and Guardians of the Galaxy's Gamora are recent examples of that approach, while even his 2012 video game Lollipop Chainsaw frequently subverts tropes in unexpected ways. The DC boss even praised John Cena breaking down Christopher Smith's macho facade in a recent interview with GamesRadar+.
"I said, 'I think you're going to break down crying.' I just was absolutely not prepared for John, who just instantly has tears rushing down his face and breaks down into sobs. And I went, 'Wow, this guy has gotten so much better over the past two years as an actor,'" Gunn said.
Peacemaker season 2 is now airing on HBO Max. For more, check out the Peacemaker season 2 release schedule, then discover all the latest on DCU Chapter One and the DCU timeline.
