Academy Award nominee Rosie Perez has been cast as Renee Montoya and will join Harley Quinn’s girl gang in the Margot Robbie film “Birds of Prey,” TheWrap has exclusively learned.
Montoya is a detective working for the Gotham City Police Department. Montoya is openly gay, and during The New 52 comics she took on a costumed identity, becoming the Question. The female superhero team-up film will be released on Feb. 7, 2020. Perez joins Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Mary Elizabeth Winstead who have been cast as Black Canary and Huntress.
Robbie will reprise her “Suicide Squad” character, Harley Quinn as well as produce alongside Kroll & Co Entertainment’s Sue Kroll and Bryan Unkeless. The film follows the adventures of a revolving group of female heroes and villains and is based on the DC Comics characters and concepts created by Jordan B. Gorfinkel and Chuck Dixon.
In addition, TheWrap has exclusively learned that the villain in “Birds of Prey” will be Black Mask, one of Batman’s foes who has never before appeared on the big screen.
Cathy Yan is set to direct. Yan is best known for writing and directing her feature debut “Dead Pigs,” which took home the World Cinema Dramatic Award For Ensemble Acting at Sundance earlier this year.
Yan would be the third female filmmaker to join the DC Universe with this film, which is still known as the Untitled Girl Gang Movie at Warner Bros. She will also be the first Asian woman to direct a DC film.
Yan was previously a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York, Hong Kong and Beijing and was one of the youngest writers in the paper’s history to pen multiple front-page stories. She is represented by CAA.
As TheWrap first reported, Christina Hodson wrote the “Birds of Prey” spinoff for Warner Bros. and DC Films. Hodson is also writing “Batgirl” for DC.
Perez has had a distinguished career ever since she broke out as Tina in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” Perez went on to play supporting roles in Ron Shelton’s “White Men Can’t Jump,” and Carla Rodrigo in Peter Weir’s “Fearless,” for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Perez recent credits include NBC’s “Rise” and she also voiced Dulce in Disney Television’s “Elena of Avalor.”
Perez will next be seen alongside Anne Hathaway in “The Last Thing He Wanted,” a political thriller directed and co-written by Dee Rees set to debut on Netflix in 2019. She’s repped by Innovative Artists, Silver Lining Entertainment, and Leslie Sloane at Vision PR.