James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad introduced a bunch of new characters, among those Silvio Luna, the dictator of Corto Maltese who planned on marrying Harley Quinn, and he not only left a long-lasting impact on her but also on the audience – here’s who plays the “hot dictator” in The Suicide Squad and where you’ve seen him before. Connected superhero universes continue to be very popular, and the two biggest ones keep expanding, though the one over at DC and Warner has had to go through major changes. After the underperformance of Justice League, the studio changed its plans for future movies in DC’s Extended Universe and has been more open to different styles and tones.
This new era in the DCEU will see its previously introduced heroes back in new stories with a less serious and dark tone than before, as seen with Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad. Viewers were introduced to Task Force X in 2016 in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, which wasn’t well-received by critics and the audience. However, (most of) the team was given a second chance in The Suicide Squad, a standalone sequel that brought back three of the original Task Force X members (Harley Quinn, Rick Flag, and Captain Boomerang) and introduced new villains who joined the team. Together, they were tasked with traveling to Corto Maltese, an island nation where the government was overthrown by an anti-American regime and where they had to destroy a Nazi-era laboratory named Jötunheim, where a secret experiment was taking place. Once in Corto Maltese, Harley was captured and brought to dictator Silvio Luna (Juan Diego Botto), whose plans included marrying her.
Harley enjoyed the luxuries that Luna had to offer and agreed to marry him but ended up killing him after he started confiding in her the history of Corto Maltese and Jötunheim, which led to Harley being tortured. Silvio Luna’s time in The Suicide Squad was brief but Juan Diego Botto’s performance and looks had a big impact on the audience, and he has been dubbed “the hot dictator” – but where have you seen Juan Diego Botto before?
The Suicide Squad’s Juan Diego Botto's Previous Works
Corto Maltese is a fictional island located in South America, so the cast playing the locals and the island’s politicians are mostly from Latin America, such as Alice Braga, who plays Sol Soria, the leader of the rebel faction, and Joaquín Cosío, who plays Major General Mateo Suárez. Juan Diego Botto isn’t the exception, and he’s an Argentinian-Spanish actor born in Argentina. His big-screen debut came in 1985 in the Spanish drama Teo el pelirrojo, and he landed his first major role in the 1990 American TV series El Zorro, where he played Don Diego de la Vega. In 1992, he played the son of Christopher Columbus in Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and he became more known after starring in the drama Historias del Kronen.
Since then, Botto has appeared in a number of projects in Spain and abroad, most notably John Malkovich’s The Dancer Upstairs (where he shared the screen with Javier Bardem), Bordertown, El Greco, God Loves Caviar, and the TV series White Lines. Although Botto is no newcomer and his name was already known in the film industry, his role as “hot dictator” Silvio Luna in The Suicide Squad will surely give his career an extra push, even if Luna’s time was cut short by Harley Quinn reading all the red flags on time. Juan Diego Botto already has a couple of projects lined up after The Suicide Squad, such as the TV series Todos Mienten and the movie En las sombras, and hopefully, he will continue taking part in bigger productions so everyone can see his talent.
