Harley Quinn Writers Address Whether or Not Clayface Can Die

Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special is now streaming on HBO Max, and it follows Harley as she tries to plan the perfect V-day for her BFF/GFF, Poison Ivy. Meanwhile, Clayface (Alan Tudyk) gets a fun story of his own. He planned to meet up with an online date, but it turned out he was being catfished by Captain Boomerang who robs him and slices him in half. However, instead of dying, Clayface ends up as two different sentient halves. Recently, showrunners Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern spoke to Variety about the new special and were asked if this was confirmation that Clayface can’t die.

“That’s a great question that I hope you don’t pose to your readers … because we don’t know,” Halpern admitted. “We’ve had a lot of arguments in the writers’ room: Can he die? He’s such a goofy character that we’ve never thought there’s been enough dramatic weight to make his death worthwhile. So we’ve never fully answered it. I guess, how do you dissolve clay? Maybe it just gets really wet?” Schumacker added, “I will say that we have zero plans of killing Clayface, so we haven’t spent a lot of bandwidth thinking of how we might kill him.” Halpern joked, “I think we just broke a story here.” Schumackerjoked, “It definitely gives new meaning to the concept of ‘Clayface gets fired.’ In a kiln! And dies!”

The duo also talked about giving Clayface a big storyline in the special, which included having him fall in love with his own butt. 

“We were talking about him, and who Clayface would be the most in love with, and we landed on: himself,” Schumacker explained. “The mechanics of that character lend themselves very easily to what we came up with – at least, our version of Clayface, where we’ve had his arm get chopped off and become sentient. We’d established Clayface’s power in Season 1, so let’s have him literally get cut in half and fall in love with his butt.”

Who Does Brett Goldstein Play in Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special?

The special also features a guest appearance from Ted Lasso star Brett Goldstein, who plays himself.  

“He’s a walking, talking aphrodisiac,” Harley Quinn executive producers Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern told EW. “A ground-up rhino’s horn made flesh.” In the special, Goldstein is starring in a one-man show in which he shows off his chest hair while ready Lord Byron’s poems and polishing his Emmy. 

“Brett is so humble, he actually was like,’ Do you want me to do this as Roy Kent?’ And when I said, ‘No, I’d like for you to do you,’ he seemed sort of taken aback,” Schumacker shared. “Which was very charming, of course. But no, it just felt right, because he is a heartthrob, whether he likes it or not. Sorry, Brett!” 

Halpern added, “He’s clearly done quite well for himself in recent years, what with Ted Lasso, and his podcast, and his bevy of awards, and now as co-creator of AppleTV+’s Shrinking, so it felt like having an A-lister showing up in Gotham for a Valentine’s Day performance would be a standing-room-only sellout, which is what the story called for.”

The first three seasons of Harley Quinn and Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine’s Day Special are now streaming on HBO Max