DC fans have been left scratching their heads today after watching Clayface and briefly catching sight of Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul as Jimmy "One Nut," Matt Hagen's father.
He appears during the movie's action-packed nightclub scene, when Matt transforms into his dead father while attacking one of the thugs who knew his old man. Did Paul spend a day on set and shoot that for fun, or was there originally more to his surprise DCU role? It turns out it was the latter.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Clayface director James Watkins confirmed that, while Paul now has "a real brief Easter egg kind of moment," there was a time when he had a supporting role in the movie.
Flashbacks to Matt's childhood were shot, though it's said that Clayface's creative team was never quite sure how much of it they planned to use. As a result, Paul was left on the cutting room floor, with his blink-and-you'd-miss-it cameo all that was left.
"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 tells the site. "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," the filmmaker continues. "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."
It's possible that these flashbacks were originally part of Mike Flanagan's take on Clayface, which may be why this exploration of Matt's past didn't make the cut (especially if the spotlight shifted to a more straightforward revenge story). As for what that transformation into Jimmy means, Watkins suggests, "He’s probably also saying, 'No, I’m not my father.'"
Elaborating on Clayface's standout nightclub scene, the director said the goal was to make audiences uncomfortable as Matt gets to grips with his new shapeshifting abilities. "I hate it in movies when a normal person suddenly becomes like a Navy SEAL, and they suddenly can be this ninja," he says. "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," Watkins concludes.
Clayface is now playing in theaters.