Harley Quinn Boss Previews the Most Musical Episode Yet, Opens Up About Scrapped Season 5 Storyline
Brainiac is on a bit of an “insane-iac” mission, and this Thursday’s episode of Max’s Harley Quinn will attempt to subvert the supersmart Coluan cyborg by alerting the populace of Metropolis through song.
Specifically, Harley (voiced by Kaley Cuoco) and friends will stage a slapdash musical about the villain’s complicated past and his nefarious plans, starring the spotlight-craving Clayface (voiced by Alan Tudyk) and also featuring Frank the Plant (J.B. Smoove) as ill-fated Koko.
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It’s no spoiler to say that things do not go as planned.
TVLine spoke with Harley Quinn showrunner Dean Lorey about the adult animated series’ take on Brainiac (voiced by Stephen Fry), the cast member that was “reluctant” to get musical, and the storyline that was unceremoniously scrapped from Season 5 (which has five episodes left to air)….
TVLINE | Brainiac had never been on Harley Quinn before, as far as I can remember. How did you arrive at this very specific approach to the character, making him a little melancholy, a lot insane…?
Once we decided we were going to move [the Season 5 action] to Metropolis, we were looking for our Big Bad, and we thought Brainiac would be perfect because he’s an agent of order whereas Harley is an agent of chaos. That was interesting to us, and it led to a lot of discussions about, “Why is Brainiac the way he is? And why does he want to perfect every world he comes to?” Once we started getting into his backstory, the one that we largely made up, we realized that he was, at least to us, a deeper and more tragic character than had been shown before, and I just love that idea. It’s like what we did with Freeze in Season 1, I think it was; with his backstory, though that came directly from the comics, we really treated him with empathy. We naturally fell into that with Brainiac.
TVLINE | It is a bit heart-crushing when he realizes that Koko is long gone.
That was something we decided early on. We wanted to bring on Koko just because we thought he was funny. Then as we started exploring who Brainiac was and what could potentially happen with him, we became entranced by it all.
TVLINE | How did you land on the great Stephen Fry to voice Brainiac?
We had talked about every kind of actor imaginable, and then we started thinking about, “Maybe he’s British?” That would give him a little more air of authority and intelligence, because—
TVLINE | — we always assume people with British accents are smarter than us.
We do! When we then decided that we wanted to essentially humanize Brainiac, to feel that arc over the course of the season, we decided that we should go with somebody who could bring gravity to it but also a gentleness. Stephen Fry came up, and he was everything you could possibly hope he would be.
TVLINE | Would you call this week’s episode the closest the show has ever come to a musical episode?
Yes. We’ve done it a bit in the past — we did a take on “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid — but not like this. This is pretty much a full-on musical, and it was a blast to write. I couldn’t wait to get to this episode. It was a very fun way to get out of a lot of exposition about Brainiac’s early days. Instead of just cutting to a flashback, this seemed like an interesting way to do it.
TVLINE | Did Alan Tudyk, Kaley Cuoco and J.B. Smoove each do their own singing?
They did, they did. Alan was, I think, a little reluctant. A little reluctant. But everything ended up great.
TVLINE | I was going to say, I reckon it’s hard enough to do Clayface’s voice, with those flourrrrr!-ishes. But to then work that into singing….
I actually couldn’t believe he was doing it. It was so complicated what he was trying to do, and it’s particularly complicated when he’s playing Clayface pretending to be another character who’s also established in the show. Add singing to it….. He was like, “What am I playing? Like, am I Brainiac? Am I Clayface?” But as usual, he found it.
TVLINE | Rewinding to the start of this season, I had to laugh at the way you quickly dispatched with the Gotham City Sirens arc that was clearly set up by Season 4’s finale. Did you simply have second thoughts over the hiatus?
We talked about it a lot, as you might imagine, and we had to make a choice: Are we going to do a Gotham City Sirens season, or are we going to do a Metropolis season? Because obviously they’re contradictory. We got excited about doing a Metropolis season, about doing a change of scenery, a “trying to get out of the rut” kind of thing, so we chose to do that. But we had made a promise at the end of [Season] 4 to the audience, so we needed to acknowledge that. And then in a typical Harley way we decided to dispense with it in the cold open, to say, “Well, that went to s–t!”
But it was always my thought that there’s a big time jump from the end of Season 4 to where we get to at the beginning of 5, and I think you could, in a future season — if there is one, God willing — jump back and pick up that season as a flashback and do the Gotham City Sirens season. Or, it would make a great long episode like the Valentine’s Day special. But I’m not announcing anything! That’s just in my head, what you could do.
TVLINE | Similarly, just when i thought you’d forgotten the Nightwing murder thread, he popped up a few weeks ago, angry as hell.
[Laughs] Yeah, we wanted to acknowledge that, too.
Want scoop on Harley Quinn, Creature Commandos or for any other TV show ? Shoot an email to [email protected], and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!
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