Wonder Man's villain was 'right about everything,' actor says

Arian Moayed reflects on playing Agent P. Cleary across three MCU projects

​Wonder Man isn’t your typical Marvel Cinematic Universe show. There isn't a supervillain in sight, and the eight-episode series doesn’t end with a massive fight against CGI monsters. Instead, the MCU’s latest is a more grounded story about two struggling actors trying to make it in a version of Hollywood where superheroes exist. The closest they come to a villain is Agent P. Cleary (Arian Moayed) from the Department of Damage Control.“Cleary is already being tagged by everyone as ‘the new villain of the MCU’ or whatever,” Moayed tells Polygon. “There's some truth to that, but he’s just trying to make ends meet.”

Cleary first appeared in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home as a DODC agent assigned to arrest Peter Parker (Tom Holland) after Mysterio revealed his identity as Spider-Man. Cleary turned up again with a more prominent role in 2022’s Ms. Marvel, where he led the investigation into Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) as a potential superpowered threat. That series saw him showing restraint when another DODC agent attempted to send soldiers into a high school to arrest Kamala and her friends.

“In Ms. Marvel, he goes against his own department and says to them, ‘You went too far on this,’" Moayed notes.

Cleary takes on his biggest MCU role yet in Wonder Man. Early on, the show reveals he’s using Trevor Slattery (the actor who posed as an international terrorist known as The Mandarin in Iron Man 3, played by Ben Kingsley) to investigate another possible superpowered threat: a struggling actor named Simon Williams (Watchmen and Aquaman co-star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Faced with a possible prison sentence if he doesn't cooperate, Trevor befriends Simon and even takes on a mentor role, all while secretly reporting back to Cleary.

Throughout Wonder Man, we also get a look into the inner workings of the Department of Damage Control, including the looming threat of layoffs and pressures from above to fill an expensive supermax prison that’s sitting half-empty. The bureaucracy of the DODC is on full display.

Moayed praises Wonder Man’s co-creators Andrew Guest and Destin Daniel Cretton for giving Cleary more depth than he’s ever had before. He’s not just a villainous DODC agent trying to thwart the good guys, he’s a guy trapped in a system, trying to do what he thinks is right.

“What I try to do with Cleary is make sure everyone realizes he's a person,” Moayed says. “He is manipulative and fun and really gets some good laughs in there, but he's also trying to get to the truth of something.”

And as the actor points out, Cleary was technically correct to investigate Simon, whose failure to control his own powers leads to some destructive moments throughout Wonder Man.

“He was kind of right about everything,” Moayed says.

Looking beyond Wonder Man, there’s no official word on when we’ll see Cleary next. When I ask whether there’s any specific MCU character he’d like to be paired up with next — Could he interrogate Captain America? — Moayed displays the exact level of secrecy you’d expect from a covert government agent.

“Sure, Captain America would be fun,” he says. “There are so many characters I would love to just chop it up with and just see what the hell is going to happen next. I'm not going to name one, but there's many.”

And what about Marvel’s next big project, Avengers: Doomsday? Is there a spot for Agent P. Cleary among the film’s already stacked cast? When I ask Moayed if he can confirm either way, he declines to comment, but does offer a reason to believe we’ll see the character again soon.

“There's more to Agent Cleary that I think the audience would like to see,” he says. “And there’s more to him that I would love to do.”

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Wonder Man is streaming now on Disney Plus.

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