Main: Polka-Dot Man’s Mom (Lynne Ashe) lets rip.
THE JOB WAS odd from the start. Lynne Ashe, a Georgia-born character actor, was offered an audition for an untitled Warner Bros. film, but nobody would say what it was, or anything about the part. Instead, they asked her to dance. She did. They asked her to dance again. She said, “Okay.” At that point, she was congratulated — she was in The Suicide Squad. And her wild ride began. “It turned out to be the most fun and complex role I’ve ever done,” Ashe beams.
Or should that be “roles”? For, to play hallucinations of the mother of dotty squad member Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), a guy with some industrial-strength mommy issues, she pops up again and again, in a bizarre and hilarious running joke that spans the movie. “I think in total I had 22 costumes,” Ashe explains. “Which is highly unusual and has never happened to me before. And probably never will again.”
For a nightclub scene in the middle of the movie, versions of Polka-Dot Man’s Mom surround her son on the dancefloor, grooving and grinding like there’s no tomorrow. And in an already-iconic group shot in a different scene, every single member of Task Force X is Momised. So Ashe got to channel every main character, from John Cena’s Peacemaker (“He was the most fun to do, because he has a certain stance”) to Sylvester Stallone’s King Shark (“They told me, ‘Okay, you’re a shark and you’re being distracted by a butterfly’”). Zoom in and you’ll see even Ratcatcher’s pet is sporting glasses. And then there was the day Ashe played a giant angry alien starfish. “It was called the ‘Starro scene’,” she remembers, “but I didn’t know I was going to be five storeys tall, punching buildings! I was on a platform and James Gunn was calling up, saying things like, ‘Now they’re attacking your ankle...’”