James Watkins explains Aaron Paul's incredibly brief cameo in Clayface

DC Studios’ R-rated Clayface is reportedly performing well at the box office this weekend, and with such a boost in eyeballs, many are catching a surprise appearance by Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul and wondering what the hell that’s all about. Here to help everyone out is the film’s director, James Watkins, who recently spoke with Entertainment Weekly about Paul’s surprise cameo and how, much like the film’s lead villain, it came to be after a series of painful cuts. 

According to Watkins, Paul’s appearance became a “brief Easter egg kind of moment” after he decided to remove the actor’s scenes from the film’s theatrical cut. The actor played Jimmy “One Nut” Hagen, the abusive criminal father of Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries), who would have appeared in flashbacks set in the Gotham Narrows where Matt grew up. The scenes were shot with Seth Thomas as a younger Matt Hagen, and Ishtar Currie Wilson (The First Omen) played Clayface’s mother. Later, “One Nut” would show his face again during the film’s climactic sequence at a Gotham City nightclub, where Matt would have transformed into his old man to freak out the mobsters who’d done his father in years earlier—the same mobsters who sliced up Matt’s face and triggered his eventual transformation into Clayface. Instead, Paul’s contributions amounted to a blink-and-miss-it cameo during Clayface’s chaotic, violent finale. 

If this “abusive dad” plot detail sounds needlessly complicated, Watkins agrees. “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?'” he said. “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.”