EPs Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker talk to ET about the adult animated series on HBO Max.
After a two-year hiatus, the adult animated series is finally back with season 3 as it continues to follow the mayhem and madness of Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco). The new episodes see Harley and Poison Ivy (Lake Bell) returning as Gotham’s new power couple, who, along with their team of misfit villains -- King Shark (Ron Funches), Clayface (Alan Tudyk), Frank the Plant (JB Smoove) -- strive to become the best version of themselves while also working toward Ivy’s desire of transforming Gotham into an Eden-like paradise.
With the first three episodes of Harley Quinn season 3 now streaming on HBO Max, executive producers Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker talk to ET about pushing the limits of what they can show onscreen, taking the DC Extended Universe’s most well-known characters in unexpected directions and getting meta with Suicide Squad filmmaker James Gunn.
[Warning: Minor spoilers for the first three episodes.]
ET: Let’s start with the opening of the premiere and that oral sex scene. Were you trying to make up for the fact that you had to cut a similar moment between Batman (Diedrich Bader) and Catwoman (Sanaa Lathan)? How did that come about?
Justin Halpern: No, it wasn’t put in because of that. This had been conceived way before that. We wanted to have an opening scene where people thought like, “Oh, they’re definitely trying to push the envelope…” We wanted to take everyone’s expectations and then subvert them when you realize it’s a porn movie and not actually Harley and Ivy. So, that was always in the cards, we knew we wanted a splashy opening scene.
Patrick Schumacker: A lot of people were asking for Harlivy sex scenes. There was a real fervor for it. So, we thought we’d try and deliver, but with a little bit of a misdirect.
Well, if nothing else, you certainly deliver on the sex this season. There is a lot of it throughout, and I was even surprised how far things go. When it comes to moments like that, is there a whole approval process? And do you guys feel good about what you were able to get away with?
JH: It felt pretty good. Obviously, there is an approval process, but DC, they’re sort of very gritty and serious. It is what people consider DC. But they have been incredibly supportive of the show. And I think it’s a bit of a mislabel, because I feel like they let you take a lot more chances than maybe other places. So for us, there was an approval process, but they were like, “Yeah, go for it,” for most of the season.
PS: Every time we turn in a draft or a cut, we send heart medication along with it.
With the Batman-Catwoman thing, not to drag that out too much, it seemed like there was this rule being like, “Don’t necessarily play with some of our characters. You can’t necessarily play with certain ideas associated with them.” But then again, it does seem like you had a lot of freedom to take characters in very different directions on this show.
PS: Yeah, this season, just talking about Batman and Bruce, I think we do some pretty unexpected and maybe unprecedented things with him. I think his motivations are coming from a place that is inherently canonical and still honors the ethos of the character. But the steps that he takes this season, I think are a little bit out there. And I was really proud that we were able to do that in concert with DC and get their blessing to have some fun with that.
That said, I was gonna ask this later, but I’ll ask it now. Without giving too much away about where things end up, it definitely feels like you're playing with the roles and tropes when it comes to these characters and who they are. I was curious, why did you guys want to mix things up and kind of turn things on their head?
JH: Well, I think we felt like in the first two seasons that we lived sort of solidly in the villain world. And when the heroes came in, they were very sort of uptight and we didn’t really get too much of a look into their lives. So, with what we did with Batman this season, we wanted to delve into all of the psyche behind someone who does what he does, right? And then also have that inform Harley and how she’s feeling about being a villain or a hero and where she kind of sits on that fence. So, it just felt like, “Oh, in this third season, let’s really dig into self-discovery and use the heroes to do that, specifically Batman.”
Would you say the theme or the overarching idea of season 3 is self-discovery? Or did you have any other concepts going in that you wanted to drive the new episodes?
PS: Yeah, I think self-discovery is kind of a bullseye. I think all the seasons of Harley so far have been pretty focused on identity and different facets of Harley's identity, specifically. But then this season, we really wanted to, especially now that she's in a fully committed relationship with Poison Ivy, we wanted to explore Ivy’s identity as well.
So, yeah, this season really concentrates on Ivy's master plan and her embracing her inner-supervillain. And I think she gets pretty much the same amount of real estate this season as Harley does, which is why we decided that in the very first episode when the main titles come up that “Poison Ivy” in green neon shows up underneath our traditional Harley logo, just to send the message that this season is really a two-hander and parallel stories of people in a committed relationship, when dealing with their moral compasses slowly deviating from each other.
Going off of that, I love that this season really stretches beyond Harley’s point of view. Like you said, we have Ivy’s POV. But, in a lot of ways, it really felt like an ensemble show in the way that it explores a lot of characters and a lot of points of view.
JH: Thank you for noticing that. I think we have the luxury of having an amazing voice cast who helped create these characters with us. Because of that, it just felt like we can build out the world and we can spend time with other characters. And you’re not like, “When are Harley and Ivy coming back onscreen?”
We used to have this joke when we worked on this show a long time ago with William Shatner. And the showrunner joked that when Shatner wasn’t onscreen, there should be a little timer in the bottom corner of the screen that says how many minutes until Shatner comes back. And I think that the nice thing about this show and being able to take our time to build it is that we’ve built out these other characters. People seem to really like them, and we feel confident that we can tell interesting, engaging stories with them and not have to have Harley and Ivy in every single scene.
That said, I do have to petition for more of Jim Rash as the Riddler. There’s just something about his performance that I just love the character, especially this season with him and Clockman as a couple. It was very funny to see him.
JH: Jim is fantastic. I mean, the man is an Oscar winner.
PS: Yeah, he’s great, and kind of a vocal chameleon. He probably wouldn’t say that, but I will say that on his behalf because he does a lot of second and third voices on the show as well – and you’d never know it's him.
Obviously, we were introduced to Nightwing early on in the season with Harvey Guillén doing that voice, and there are a number of notable cameos and DC characters that appear later in the season. And I was curious, how do you decide who gets to come through Harley Quinn?
PS: Thankfully, we have quite a few writers on our staff that know a great deal about the DC universe and the who's who of it. So, you know, generally based on whatever plot line we come up with, we’re able to pretty quickly assign a guest character. And if we’re stuck on one, we have literature sitting on our writers’ room table and DC is also a phone call away.
So, this is just speaking to something in season 1. But when we landed on Jason Praxis (Phil LaMarr), that was a character that we were all pretty much unfamiliar with. But we called up DC and we’re just basically like, “OK, we need a character who has a ponytail and also might have some electrical powers.” And they were like, “Yeah, Jason Praxis.” So, it’s really whatever best serves the story.
There have been times where we’ve been tempted to create new characters and they’ll show up. Like, Cheryl (Lake Bell) is a character that exists only in the show. But, it’s like, there are thousands and thousands of preexisting characters in the DCU, and so, what’s the point of inventing new characters unless you absolutely have to.
So, in the instance of Nightwing being a part of this season, what inspired bringing him on? Was that largely because of what you guys were doing with Batman?
PS: Yeah, pretty much, especially with Batgirl (Briana Cuoco) and her sort of taking more of a leadership position in the Bat family. We wanted to give her an antagonist and we thought that Nightwing would be a good one if we played him a little bit more emo, a little bit more brooding and kind of full of himself.
That he would be returning from Bludhaven, ostensibly, because Gotham needs him, or so he says. Then he gets to the Batcave and finds out that the ecosystem of the Batcave has changed quite a bit. There’s Batgirl, all of a sudden, who is this charlatan who’s taking up his locker. So yeah, he’s just this blowhard character who pops in and basically tries to put Batgirl in her place. So, we looked at him as a nice challenge for Batgirl.
Another thing I love about this season are all the meta jokes, from HBO Max to the Suicide Squad films, and having James Gunn on as himself. What was it like getting to work with him and did it take much effort to get him to lend his voice here?
PS: That was an absolute dream. He follows the show. He’s a fan of the show. I knew that we needed a big, A-list movie director in this season to be hemming A Hard Wayne's Gonna Fall, which is the Thomas Wayne biopic starring Billy Bob Thornton, who voices himself in the titular role of Thomas Wayne.
James and I, we don’t really know each other very well at all, but we follow each other on Twitter and I just kind of, shot in the dark, sent a DM to him one day and explained the scenario. And, literally, within 15 minutes got a DM back, like, “Yep, I’m in. That sounds great. Here’s my rep’s info.” And two weeks later, I got to voice direct him remotely.
He was up in Vancouver shooting Peacemaker, so I got to spend about an hour with him knocking out all of his scenes for pretty much the whole season. It was wonderful. And we got to riff a little bit, do a little bit of improv stuff and gave him alt jokes that were probably too meta. We had a Thanos joke in there that didn’t make the cut ‘cause we thought it was kind of world-breaking. But we had some Roger Corman jokes in there that poked a little fun at James’ past body of work.
He was such a good sport and he obviously gets the tone of the show. I feel like Peacemaker is kind of a live-action kindred spirit or spiritual twin, whatever you wanna call it, to Harley. So, it was great. It was an absolute dream come true.
One of the things that drew me into Harley Quinn as a show and I feel like it’s gotten even bigger this season is the queerness of it all. I was just curious, for you guys, from the conception of the show to now, was there a conversation about queering the DC universe and what you wanted to do with that?
JH: Yeah. For us, it was born out of the idea that Harley and Ivy are in love with each other and in a romantic way and not just like two friends, and we wanted to explore that. Pat and I are two straight dudes and so, I think had we been left to our own devices, we probably would have explored that not in the best way. But we have queer writers on staff who, when we said we wanted to do this, were like, “All right, well, this is the way we should explore this.”
For us, it was like, “OK, great. Let’s do it the right way.” Then from there, it was like, there are certain characters in our show that to us and the writing staff that seemed like queer characters. And then it was like, if they are queer characters to us and it organically comes into the stories, why would we shy away from that? Let’s just be explicit. Like, the Riddler is dating another man. That’s in our show and the Riddler is queer. That was how we had always sort of seen that character.
And it felt a lot of times in other shows, they were hinting that this character’s queer, but they’re not gonna do that and they’re not gonna actually explicitly say that this person is queer. And in our show, it was just like, this character is queer. And so, when they’re out at The Villys, this queer character will be with their partner, right?
It just felt like, let’s not shy away from anything, and to DC’s credit, we never got one note about whether a character’s queer or not or like, “You can’t show this or that, any of that stuff.” It was never a discussion. We just did it and they were completely supportive of it.
PS: And it seems like it’s something that DC is really embracing even on the publishing side of things, too. Like, with Jon Kent and Tim Drake, we are starting to see openly queer characters in the comics as well, which is cool. It just feels like it’s a real push for that, which is only a good thing in our book.
To wrap us up, I was surprised by a lot of the unexpected turns and fun storytelling choices in season 3. But I was just curious, what do you guys want to tease about the remaining episodes and what fans can look forward to?
JH: I’m glad you said that you were surprised by the turns ‘cause we felt like we have some surprising turns coming up. We feel like we have some real big swings, big turns. And if you were like, “I saw those coming,” I would’ve been like, “Ah, f**k.” So, yeah, I don’t think people are gonna figure out who the big bad is until you meet the big bad.
I also think we show you who the big bad is a lot earlier than we normally might show them. And then we play with that. And there’s a twist on why that person is the big bad, So, I’m excited for all of those twists. I’m excited for some of the stuntier episodes.
PS: I think people are gonna be pleased with where we end up this season, knowing that we promised that Harley and Ivy will maintain or will remain in a committed relationship for the life of the series. I think that’s been the big challenge for us, like, “How do we organically deliver sort of the trials and tribulations within a relationship between two people whose vocations are maybe starting to become, at least philosophically, like polar opposites, but they’re still madly in love with each other?” That’s been the challenge of this season. And if we’re lucky enough to move forward and get another season, it’s certainly something that we’ll be exploring.
The first three episodes of Harley Quinn season 3 are now streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes debuting weekly through Sept. 15.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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