***SPOILERS BELOW***
Near the end of Clayface, the latest movie in James Gunn‘s DC Universe, viewers might have noticed that Aaron Paul briefly appeared on screen for maybe a second. It’s a weird cameo (if you can even call it that), but there was originally more to Paul’s appearance in Clayface, as revealed by director James Watkins in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Watkins explained that Paul had been cast to play Matt Hagen’s abusive dad in Clayface, with the original cut of the DCU movie featuring several flashbacks to Matt’s life growing up in the slums of Gotham City. Seth Thomas and Ishtar Currie Wilson were also cast to play a younger Matt and his mother, respectively.
Ultimately, all of these flashbacks were removed from the final cut of Clayface, with just the brief moment of Matt impersonating his father seeing the light of day. “He has a real brief Easter egg kind of moment,” Watkins told EW about Paul’s appearance.
The filmmaker went on to describe how Matt’s father’s role in Clayface evolved as the movie went through the various stages of production:
“In terms of trying to figure out the character, it was, How much is Matt defined by his past and how much is he an everyman? At one point, we were looking at it and thinking, Is it the ‘sins of the father’? But actually, as we worked on the script, I thought that notion of revenge was more universal and more relatable to all of us. It doesn’t matter whether you’re carrying a trauma or any of that. If we’re slighted, we carry this sense of being wronged and we all want to do something, but generally in life we can’t do anything about it and we’re powerless.”
“With Matt, it’s not that he’s a bad guy trying to be good. He’s a decent guy, but then like all people, we all have primal impulses within us that can be dangerous, whether that’s impulses for love, whether that’s impulses for retribution.”
With that change in perspective, Matt’s father went from haunting his son in the present to being used by Matt as a weapon against those who wronged him. “He’s probably also saying, ‘No, I’m not my father,'” Watkins added.
Paul’s brief cameo comes during what I consider at least to be the highlight of Clayface: the fight sequence at Vesuvius club, which Watkins refers to as “the dark glee of the film” to EW. He elaborated on how the scene went together and how he tried to avoid making Matt seem like he was suddenly the next big action hero:
“I hate it in movies when a normal person suddenly becomes like a Navy SEAL and they suddenly can be this ninja. I kept saying in that scene, Matt’s superpower is his ability to shift and to change. It’s his ability to disguise…and then earning a kind of complicity with the audience. The audience being locked in with Matt and enjoying it, saying we’re all together on this ride, then when he starts going too far, it puts the audience in a queasy spot.”
Clayface is now playing in theaters. Have you seen it? Share your spoiler thoughts in our discussion thread here.
Are you bummed that Aaron Paul’s Clayface role was largely removed from the final cut? Do you want to see a “Paul Cut”?
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