This fall, Clerks stars Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson returned to Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse with Clerks III. The duo reprised their roles as Dante Hicks and Randal Graves, respectively, with Anderson returning to the role for the first time since 2006’s Clerks II, and closed out what now appears to be pretty definitively a trilogy of films centering on the lives of two convenience store clerks from New Jersey. By the time the movie is over, Smith has imprinted himself on Randal, reinventing the slacker as a filmmaker. Dante has a decidedly different ending, but O’Halloran is not sure that this will be his final word on the character.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Spoilers ahead for Clerks III, due out on DVD and Blu-ray next week.
Clerks III centers on Randal’s decision to become a filmmaker, something he hopes will give his life meaning after he is faced with his own mortality following a heart attack. In the third act, Dante has a heart attack of his own — but he doesn’t make it, and the final moments of the film center on how Dante and the rest of their Quick Stop crew move on with their lives after the passing of the man who had been their stable center for years.
“[Kevin Smith] had given me an outline as to where it was going to go,” O’Halloran told ComicBook.com of his character’s death. “As far as when reading it, I thought it was done very beautifully. I’m not going to lie; I got emotional in just reading it, because this is a character that had appeared in not only just the two Clerks films, but other films as well, and of course, the cartoon. These are things that have been shouted at me by fans — the lines — all the time. So, seeing it come to an end the way it did, it was emotional. At the same time, it was a beautiful way of ending, it and we’ll see where we go from here with it.”
The cartoon he mentioned was a short-lived ABC series titled Clerks, which was created by Smith with Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm writer/producer David Mandel. The series aired only two episodes in 2000, but in 2001, all six of the produced episodes were released on VHS and DVD. Soon, the series went into syndication on Comedy Central and Cartoon Network, making it a staple for college kids of the mid-2000s. A planned movie version, Clerks: Sell Out, provided some of the ideas that eventually evolved into Clerks III.
“We would love to continue telling these stories of Dante and Randall, and the other characters, perhaps in an animated type of format again, where we fill in the gaps in between all three of those films,” O’Halloran told us. “That’s my hope of it. I don’t think it’s completely over. I mean we were you able to bring back Becky after she supposedly had passed, so why not another Force ghost Dante showing up?”
Becky is Rosario Dawson’s character, who married Dante at the end of Clerks II. In the opening moments of Clerks III, audiences learned that she had died in between films — almost immediately after Clerks II, in fact. And while she appeared to Dante a few times to deliver sage advice and dirty jokes in Clerks III, the “Force ghosts” line is even more on-the-nose when you consider that Star Wars-inspired ghosts in the likeness of Dante, Randal, and Charles Barkley appeared in an episode of the Clerks cartoon.
Clerks III is currently available on Digital. You can get the movie on DVD and Blu-ray starting on Tuesday, December 6th.
