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It's been 28 years since Kevin Smith made Clerks, and more than 15 since Clerks 2, both extremely personal movies which have almost served as occasional check-ins on the filmmaker's state of mind, but nothing in Smith's career feels as intimately personal as Clerks 3. The film is essentially a movie about how Smith made his first movie, Clerks, and as such feels like a winding ouroboros eating the tail of his career.
A hell of a lot has happened onscreen and off since the previous two installments of Clerks — offscreen, Smith had a near-fatal heart attack and subsequently lost 75 pounds; in the world of Clerks, Dante (played by Brian O'Halloran) apparently had a daughter with the fan-favorite character Becky Scott (charmingly played by Rosario Dawson), and both women died. That's right, Becky's dead, and it's not even a spoiler, just something that happened in the past 15 years since audiences last saw these characters. It's anticlimactic and surprising, but entirely appropriate in a sense. That's just how life happens. Dawson spoke with MovieWeb recently about Becky's demise, her surprising return as a horny ghost, and the fun filmmaking world of Kevin Smith.
Rosario Dawson Makes a Surprising Return to Clerks 3
"You know, I don't know where this character was," said Dawson, who was also surprised by the character's death sometime in the past. Smith has been working on a script for Clerks 3 on and off for years, always wanting to make it "a movie about dealing with grief," as he told The Hollywood Reporter. "I don't know how different it was in the original script that he had written for this, that he was planning on doing a few years ago. I was game to do it. He knew that whatever it was, I wanted to be part of it."
"But yeah, I was definitely really surprised," continued Dawson, discussing the quiet revelation of her character in this uniquely tender Smith movie. "It's heartbreaking, it's tragic, and it feels like it's controversial. But it makes sense. Like, it's immediately captivating, and really has a gravitas to it. You've been on this journey with these characters, all from the first film, and there's such a weight immediately there. It feels very real, like that's something we can all relate to."
Dawson elaborated:
We lose people, we have these relationships, people who are really important to us, and they change. I think that's such an important theme of this film, looking at characters that are friends and people you know, and have slice of life moments with; if you spend a long enough time with them, you're gonna get some deep things that happen, because none of us can get through this life unscathed, even the guy behind the counter at the convenience store.
Dawson is intuitively connected with Smith's process, and really embraces the same simplicity and lower-case-h humanity that he does (even if she is a massive star, leading the upcoming Star Wars series Ahsoka and the big Disney film Haunted Mansion). "The humanity that he's always embedded into his projects, like the celebration of the mundane, making these little debates and banter something worthy of a story has been super cool," said Dawson. Clerks 3 certainly continues the playful, culturally referential, dirty dialogue between Dante and Randal seen in the previous Clerks films, but this installment is much more unexpectedly emotional and moving.
Becky Scott and Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse
"He puts much more weight behind it because of these relationships and changes that he, Kevin, experienced," said Dawson. "He had the Widowmaker heart attack. Like, this movie wouldn't exist if he hadn't survived it, and it wouldn't exist the way that it exists if he didn't have the support of his friends and family who have been with him all along the way. It works, and it's really well-earned over many a decade, and it's really cool. It feels really special to be a part of."
Yes, Dawson's character is dead, but she's definitely still a part of Clerks 3. She's emotionally significant and important here; much of Clerks 3 is Randall's movie, quite literally, as it focuses on his attempts to make an autobiographical movie after suffering a heart attack, so Dawson's character provides Dante a richer emotional arc and interior development that would be absent without her. However, she's also hilarious, talking to Dante at her grave about all the celebrities and historical figures she has sex with in heaven (George Washington Carver in particular, since she "always did love peanut butter," as Dante recalls).
Becky was one of the best parts of Clerks 2, a warm, complicated, sexy, and very funny character who held her own in the boy's club of Smith's View Askewnivervse. It was something Dawson was interested in joining back in the early 2000s, after her breakout role in the indie movie Kids, which was released a year after Smith's debut with Clerks. "I was definitely very curious about anything that Kevin was doing that I can be a part of," said Dawson, "because of his filmmaking, but also being indie filmmakers and storytellers together, and sort of that independent film moment that we all found ourselves in."
Dirty Jokes and Deep Friendship in Clerks
Then again, Dawson has the same affinity for delightfully dirty humor as Smith. "The donkey show was definitely the icing on the cake," said Dawson, referring to why she joined the Clerks universe. "I immediately read that scene and said, 'Kinky Kelly — yes.' And also, this character, she's so herself. She and Dante's relationship, that Brian [O'Halloran] so brilliantly shoulders in this film, has weight to it. It's two people who are just easy with each other, who just get each other, who just relate with each other. Just like between him and Randall, sometimes that can be overlooked and underappreciated."
Clerks 3 is an ode to independent filmmaking and a very meta self-reflection on Smith's part, but it's also a touching tribute to friendship and deeply personal connections between people, especially the kind that are often masked by jokes and sarcasm. "You know, we get really caught up in the drama of other things," said Dawson.
She continued, highlighting the somehow poignant beauty of these otherwise silly movies:
We can take for granted what's right in front of us, and I think that's what [Smith] has done such a brilliant job over all these years with, is really reminding us of that. I like that this character and this relationship got to be seen again, and how dynamic it is and charming it is, and relatable it is. You know, it's special, because they allow themselves to experience it, even if it didn't necessarily make sense to other people. And I think that's really cool. It's something that we should be challenged with more often.
Lionsgate, in partnership with Fathom Events, will be releasing Clerks 3 exclusively in theaters from September 13th to 18th.