Aaron Paul has made a career out of skating just above the depths of human nature, having broken big playing the unlikely heart of Breaking Bad, brought comedy relief to the existential misery of BoJack Horseman, and served as one of the least aggressively fucked-up human beings/robots on HBO’s Westworld. So it feels pretty wild to hear Paul declare a role was simply too dark for him to continue doing, as he did in a recent interview where he talked about his time on the third season of Prime Video animated superhero series Invincible.
“I put myself in that skin, and it was a skin I didn’t feel comfortable in, to be honest,” Paul said of his stint on the series, as superpowered vigilante Powerplex. Talking to Kinda Funny Gamescast (about his latest superhero voice role, in new superteam management video game Dispatch), Paul noted that he’d declined an invitation to return to the superhero series for its upcoming fourth season. Making it clear that he’s a big fan of the show, and its creative team, the actor laid it out bluntly: “I didn’t want to do it anymore. What it did to me, I didn’t like.”
To be fair to Paul, Powerplex is a lot: Appearing in a handful of episodes in the third season, the character got a spotlight in “All I Can Say Is I’m Sorry,” which retells some of the big moments from earlier in the show’s run from the point of view of Scott Duvall, a pretty regular dude whose sister and niece wind up as collateral damage in one of the show’s incredibly brutal superhero battles. Enraged by a society that can’t hold the superhumans flying above it accountable, Scott steals superpower technology to supercharge his own latent abilities, and goes after the guy he blames for killing his family: Steven Yeun’s Invincible. The episode that follows is one of the show’s bleakest, up to and including the bit where Scott’s powers go out of control, killing his wife and infant child, and leaving him with nothing but the bitter pursuit of revenge.
So, yeah: Hard to blame a guy for not wanting to soak his brain in that vibe. “It was just way too grueling on my psyche,” the actor said in the interview. “I have such respect for what they’re doing.” (Given that Powerplex is a pretty major character in the original Invincible comics, which the series tends to be pretty devoted to following, it feels likely the role will be recast, as a part played by Ezra Miller was a few years back.)
[via Comicbookmovie.com]
