Suicide Squad: David Harbour’s Dexter Tolliver Is A Comic Villain

David Harbour didn’t get much screen time in Suicide Squad but his character Dexter Tolliver is a comic book villain. Harbour’s part in Suicide Squad came hot on the heels of his breakout role as Chief Jim Hopper in the first season of Netflix’s horror series Stranger Things. Hopper quickly became a fan favorite so Stranger Things viewers were hyped to see what Harbour would do with a role in a DCEU movie like Suicide Squad.

David Harbour played Dexter Tolliver, the president’s national security advisor and supporter of antihero Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). After hearing Amanda’s pitch for her Task Force X team of criminal misfits, Tolliver makes the case to The Pentagon for its implementation with a little help from Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and her menacing magical powers. Unfortunately, Harbour’s Suicide Squad role amounted to little more than a few lines of dialogue and a few minutes of screen time so audiences didn’t get to see him do much with his character.

Dexter Tolliver’s comic book counterpart plays a far meatier and more villainous role than the Suicide Squad movie. In the DC Comics, he sometimes goes by Derek rather than Dexter Tolliver and made his debut in Fury Of Firestorm#64 (1987). In that issue, he’s acting as the National Security Council’s liaison officer for the Suicide Squad and insists – at gunpoint – that his subordinates unleash the supervillain Parasite to take down Firestorm against the wishes of Amanda Waller and Rick Flag.

Dexter – or Derek – Tolliver later appeared in several issues of the first volume of Suicide Squad between 1987 and 1988. In the Suicide Squad comics, Tolliver used his top-secret knowledge of the squad to blackmail Amanda Waller into helping get the corrupt politician Senator Joseph Cray re-elected by threatening to expose Task Force X. His villainous nature came to the fore when he ordered Amanda to have the Suicide Squad kill off Cray’s opponents to ensure his re-election, but luckily he was killed by Flag before his evil plans came into fruition.

It’s a shame David Harbour’s Dexter Tolliver didn’t play as big a role in Suicide Squad as his character did in the comics. There were hopes Tolliver might get more screen time in sequel The Suicide Squad but Harbour, unfortunately, isn’t attached to the film. He has, however, defected to the MCU in which he’ll soon take on the role of Red Guardian in Black Widow and hopefully have a tad more to do with his character.