Warning: This article contains spoilers for “Clayface.”
If you didn’t catch Aaron Paul’s cameo in “Clayface,” we don’t blame you.
News broke earlier this year that the “Breaking Bad” star would appear in James Watkins’ DCU-set horror movie, which tells the origin story of the Batman villain Clayface (in this film, Matt Hagen, played by Tom Rhys Harries). Not much was known about who Paul would play in the film, penned by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini — though some fans went as far as to speculate that Paul would be playing Bruce Wayne himself in the larger DCU.
In the end, Paul didn’t play Batman. In fact, most of his appearance ended up on the cutting room floor. Instead, Paul appeared for about one second as Jimmy “One Nut” Hagen, the father of Matt Hagen, as Matt uses his clay powers to transform into his dad to scare some mobsters during a club-set fight scene near the end of the film.
Watkins confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that Paul originally had a more significant role as Jimmy, portraying Matt’s abusive father in a series of flashbacks. These scene were cut out of the final film, focusing it further on Matt’s story and only briefly alluding to his father and history.
“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?” Watkins told EW. “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.”
Paul appears briefly in a larger third-act set piece where Matt attempts to get back at the Gotham mobsters who scarred his face, thus forcing him to seek out the treatment that made him Clayface. Matt, an Oscar-nominated actor, lures a number of men onto a club dance floor, where he systematically takes them down by shifting his appearance into other characters from the film. In this sequence, and the rest of the third act, it becomes clear that “Clayface” isn’t attempting to be an antihero story like many other villain-led comic book films; rather, it’s a story fully committed to depicting Matt’s descent into anger and revenge.
“With Matt, it’s not that he’s a bad guy trying to be good,” Watkins told EW. “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.”
“Clayface” is in theaters now.
