The actor, who plays Gotham underworld figure Markos Szabo in Clayface, said rewatching DC films with his eight-year-old son made the unfamiliar franchise feel personal.
David Dencik didn't grow up on the DC Universe. His eight-year-old son did the homework for him.
The actor, who plays Gotham crime figure Markos Szabo in Clayface, told Bollywood Hungama in an exclusive interview that he leaned on his son to get up to speed on a franchise he admits was new territory for him. "Stepping into the DC Universe has been quite a ride," Dencik said. "It was also kind of new to me, to be honest. But thanks to my son, he's eight, I started going deep into the DC Universe and watching some of the movies together with him to have a better understanding of it all. And I really enjoyed doing that."
That family movie marathon turned out to be more than research. It became, in Dencik's telling, a way to engage with Gotham's mythology on his own terms before stepping on set.
He wasn't walking in completely cold, either. Dencik has worked with director James Watkins and executive producer Paul Ritchie before, on an earlier project, and said the familiarity made a studio production feel less intimidating. "There was a wonderful group of people working on the film," he said, calling it "a very safe space to work in."
What surprised him more, by his own account, was the setting. Clayface shot in Liverpool, a city Dencik had visited before with Watkins on that earlier show, but never through a comic-book lens. Seeing it redressed as Gotham changed how he saw a place he thought he already knew.
"I had never seen Liverpool through the lens of the DC Universe, from that perspective," Dencik said. "Some of the locations they found were absolutely spectacular, and I understand why they wanted to go to Liverpool. It really did look like Gotham City, or rather, they made it into Gotham City. I'm not quite sure what's the chicken and what's that egg in that process."
The comment points to something the production clearly leaned on hard: Liverpool's old architecture doing heavy lifting for Gotham's atmosphere, rather than a city built entirely on a soundstage. For an actor playing one of the darker figures moving through that world, the city itself seems to have shaped how he approached the role.
Dencik's remarks, shared exclusively with Bollywood Hungama, don't touch on plot or where Szabo fits into Clayface's story. But they do offer a rare glimpse of how an actor outside the usual superhero circuit found his footing, one evening of DC movies with his kid at a time. No release date details came up in the conversation, leaving fans to wait on the studio for when Gotham-via-Liverpool actually hits screens.
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