‘Harley Quinn’ Stars Kaley Cuoco And Lake Bell Got Competitive Over The Number Of F-Bombs In Each Episode

The Harley Quinn series, which debuted over the weekend on DC Universe’s streaming service, is a blast. It’s fun and feminist, for the purposes of our discussion right now, full of profanity. And apparently, the two lead female voices of the series, Kaley Cuoco (Harley) and Lake Bell (Poison Ivy), competed over the allowed number of F-bombs that Warner Bros. would permit on the series. Well, it doesn’t even tangibly feel like a limit exists when watching the series, so one must chalk that up to the showrunners, Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, carefully doling out the goods.

One must pick and choose their battles in life. ComicBook spoke with Schumacker, who revealed that Warner Bros. was pumped for an R-rated take on the supervillainess, but then the studio realized that there’s such a thing as too many F-bombs:

“They saw the first episode and they were like, wow that’s a lot [expletive] of in an episode. By like, episode two we had 21 [expletive] in it. 21 F-words in it and that’s basically a [expletive] a minute and they were like, ‘No you gotta like, put a cap on it.’ So, we actually got like, a number from them I don’t know if it was completely arbitrary or not but the show still works with only 8 a show.”

The show, as Schumacker now guestimates, probably lands somewhere in the NC-17 realm when all profanity and violence is considered as a whole. However, it’s simply not enough for either leading lady. Bell told ET that “there’s often a fight” to see whether she or Cuoco can nab the greatest number of curse words for their characters. Cuoco then admitted her dilemma, since they don’t record in the same room, and sometimes, she’d arrive at work, only to wonder, “Did Lake take the last f*** again” The struggle is real.

You can catch the ET clip below.