Jared Leto has been cast as the Joker

Just six years after Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for playing the Joker in The Dark Knight, the Batman villain is set for another big-screen outing. Jared Leto, who won his own Oscar for last year's Dallas Buyers Club, will star as the Joker in Warner Bros.' Suicide Squad.

Leto joins a star-studded cast that includes Tom Hardy as Rick Flagg, a tough-guy military expert; Will Smith as Deadshot, a legendarily lethal assassin; and Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, the Joker's similarly deranged partner-in-crime. Variety adds that Jesse Eisenberg is in talks to reprise the role of Lex Luthor from the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and that the studio is still casting for the role of Suicide Squad organizer Amanda Waller, with Oprah Winfrey as the first choice.

Suicide Squad is based on the D.C. Comics series of the same name, which follows a group of incarcerated supervillains whose sentences will be commuted if they complete a string of high-risk missions for the U.S. government. The film adaptation will be directed by Fury's David Ayer, hitting theaters in August 2016.

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