Aaron Paul's Clayface cameo is brief: he plays Matt Hagen's father

Flashbacks with Paul as the abusive father were largely cut, but he still appears in the club fight.

Aaron Paul is in *Clayface*, the DC Studios horror film about the Batman villain, but only briefly. Director James Watkins confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the Breaking Bad star plays Matt Hagen's father, calling it a "real brief Easter egg kind of moment."

The cameo comes in the fight at the Vesuvius club. Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) shifts into several people to move through the crowd, then takes his father's form to confront the gangster who killed his father. Paul has no lines, and the moment is brief.

Additional flashbacks were shot over a few days, with Paul playing the abusive father. The team was not sure how much would be used, and after more discussion the material was largely cut.

Watkins described how the team worked out the character. The question was "How much is Matt defined by his past and how much is he an everyman?" At one point the team asked whether the story was about the "sins of the father", but Watkins said he came to see revenge as "more universal and more relatable to all of us."

Watkins added:

"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."

Watkins said Matt is not meant to be a bad guy trying to be good. He said, "With Matt, it's not that he's a bad guy trying to be good," and added that Matt is "a decent guy" with impulses that everyone has, and that those impulses can be dangerous.

Watkins describes the club sequence as the dark glee of the film. It is the point where Matt shows the full range of his shapeshifting, a balance between playful levity and brutal violence.

Paul previously worked with Max Minghella, who plays Gotham P.D. Detective John Borrelli, on the 2016 mystery-thriller The 9th Life of Louis Drax. Watkins said that film could have "possibly unconsciously" made enough of an impression to cast them both.