Why ‘Justice League’ Cut an Entire Character From the Film

Justice League features plenty of character introductions, but there is one that didn’t make the cut.

Spoilers incoming for Justice League, so if you haven’t seen it yet you’ve been warned.

While Mera makes her debut in Justice League, there is one additional character of Aquaman’s world that was cut from the final product. That would be Nuidis Vulko, who is played by Willem Dafoe, and Jason Momoa revealed to Gamespot why he was cut.

“There’s a place where [Aquaman] goes down to, and it got cut out of the movie,” Momoa said. “He knows spots where he can go and he can see these statues, the remnants of [Atlantis]. There’s Vulko–obviously, we’ll have way more scenes with Vulko, Willem Dafoe–in [the 2018 standalone] Aquaman. There just wasn’t enough time in this movie.”

Comic fans know of Vulko’s importance to the overall Aquaman mythos, and Momoa revealed the role he will play in the film universe’s future King of Atlantis.

“Vulko’s his connection to Atlantis,” Momoa said. “I think what Zack [Snyder] and I did, we were kind of trying to establish that he was taken down there as a boy, and he was an outcast, he was a half-breed, and he was built up as a young boy, because he was fed all these ideas by Vulko–that he was the rightful king. And he gets down there, and he’s a half breed, he’s impure, and I’m just made to feel like I’m this disease. So after that, I was like, ‘f*** you, f*** you, I’m on my own.’”

That’s part of the reason why this Aquaman detests Atlanteans so much, something seen in his brief appearance under the water in League.

“He hates Atlanteans, he cannot stand being on land. He just–he’s stuck in the tide. That’s what Zack wanted,” Momoa continued. “He was a blue collar worker. The guy worked in very lonely places, on oil rigs, he’d weld, and he could just be in peace, and he could exist on there and no one would know his secret. But there’s things where ships went down and he couldn’t save enough people, and he lost friends. The humanity side of him can’t deal with this power that he doesn’t know how to control yet.”

Justice League is in theaters now.