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The ancient Greeks used terra-cotta masks to express the extremes of emotion during their theater performances. The new film Clayface hopes to function in a similar way.
Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, an actor whose blockbuster earnings and award-season accolades have propelled him to stardom. It all falls apart when his face is horribly mangled and he undergoes an experimental medical procedure to repair the damage. This also grants him the unexpected ability to shape-shift his appearance at will. As fans of Batman comic books and cartoons already know, this goes pretty wrong too, resulting in one of the most gruesome villains of the DC universe.
The new film, out Friday, is already an online battleground, with some haters questioning its existence, sight unseen. Early reviews turned out to be surprisingly enthusiastic, but Clayface still has a lot to prove and hardened attitudes to overcome—especially after the dubious history of Spider-Man offshoots that centered supporting characters like Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter.
Clayface aims higher than those other comic spin-offs, attempting to turn the DC creature-feature into a pulpy morality play. It is a cautionary tale, wrapped up in body horror, arriving just in time for Halloween. It is also an experiment of sorts for DC Studios chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran, who have taken Batman out of the equation and presented fans with the monster as the main character. Rhys Harries hopes it will play as a tragedy, along the lines of those ancient actors and their twisted masks.
“Matt is reputationally destroyed. He’s just clutching, trying to find some solid ground to retain a life that he’s worked really hard to build,” says Rhys Harries, best known for the TV thrillers Suspicion and White Lines. “My mum’s an English teacher, and, thematically, I remember talking to her about this fairly early on. She turned to me at one point and was like, ‘It’s like Oedipus Rex.’ “
He quickly clarifies that he’s talking thematically, not that the movie mirrors the Sophocles play. (Clayface makes some horrific choices but does not kill his father and inadvertently seduce his mother.) Like that tragic, self-destructive Oedipus from antiquity, Matt Hagen is arrogant and deluded, and he doesn’t realize he’s the bad guy until it’s far too late. “Comic books stand the test of time because they operate functionally in the same way as Greek mythology,” Rhys Harries says. “They’re timeless things, but you have to hold on tight to the metaphor that you’re telling. Otherwise it just becomes a pretty spectacle with no roots.”
That sets a high standard for a film that wears its B-movie bona fides just as proudly. As Matt’s chiseled features begin to dissolve and fuse together, director James Watkins, whose credits include 2012’s The Woman in Black and 2024’s Speak No Evil, occasionally puts aside the high-minded tragedy for gross-out shocks. In one especially skin-crawling sequence, he uses cuticle scissors to reopen his fused eyelids in an airplane bathroom while turbulence tosses him back and forth.
Still, the script explores plenty of interior, emotional terror. It was written by Carrie and The Haunting of Hill House showrunner Mike Flanagan and Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini. “If I’m trying to do a horror story, I’m not just interested in scares,” Watkins tells Esquire. “I want to have something that’s got some heart, some soul to it.”
In this case, he says, Clayface is about a man who doesn’t realize he is the monster wreaking havoc in his own life. He might find a lot in common with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Who are we? And how do we present what’s within?” Watkins says. “When most of us are wronged in life, we want justice, or we have a sense of resentment, and we have an anger that’s buried inside. With Matt, one of the side effects from the treatment is [releasing] these primal urges within. The conflict in the movie is between the rational man and the caveman within.”
There’s also something intriguing about the fact that, in Batman lore, Clayface is an actor. As John Updike once put it: “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
“I mean, that’s the perfect quote,” Rhys Harries says. “The fame aspect of Clayface is there dramatically just amplifying this man’s predicament.” He not only has a severe fall but also a very public one.
This descent only works if the central character starts out as a good guy. When Clayface introduces Matt, he’s a guy who finally escaped the Narrows, an especially rough neighborhood in the all-around harsh urban sprawl of Gotham City. He might be a little cocky, but he’s nowhere near a monster. At least, no more than any other Hollywood leading man who got too famous too fast.
“There should be a relatability to Matt,” says Rhys Harries. “He has worked his way up out of nothing to achieve the success that he has, and he’s trying to help others out. He wants to be a net positive on those around him. His humanity is stripped away from him, and even throughout the film he tries to swim against the stream.”
One of the influences on his Clayface performance was the One Bad Day series of DC comic-book stories, which take their inspiration from a line the Joker says to Batman in 1988’s The Killing Joke: “All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.”
“The notion of this series of comics is that one bad day in anybody’s life can turn you into a villain,” Rhys Harries says. “If you think about the structures around our lives, it’s fairly frightening how few steps there are for your built existence to be taken away.”
Matt makes some pompous decisions that put him in unnecessary danger early in the film, but the brutal mutilation he experiences is a crime itself, completely unjustified. It also goes unpunished until madness seeps in and he takes matters (not to mention his facial matter) into his own hands. “How he defines himself is taken away,” says Watkins. “As an actor, his face is his instrument. It’s his tool to express himself. So by having his face destroyed, it’s like if you were a concert pianist and someone smashed your hands up. That’s relatable at a deeper level than pure vanity.”
It’s unclear now whether Clayface will stand alone or become something that Gunn and Safran weave into wider DC storytelling. Watkins says he isn’t 100 percent sure himself if it fits into theBatman world of Robert Pattinson or some other as-yet-undetermined version of the Dark Knight. “It’s in Clayface world. I don’t know!” he says. “There’s obviously overlap between all the worlds … but [DC] contains so many multitudes.”
He says the goal was to create something independent of all those other shared universe tethers. “They wanted to expand the borders of the universe,” Watkins says. That gave him license to venture into R-rated territory. The director says making audiences afraid requires its own fearlessness.
“If you buy a ticket for a roller coaster, you don’t want the roller coaster to be a flat ride. You want it to have some bumps; you want it to rattle your rib cage a little bit,” he says. “But at the same time, you don’t want it to be grim. There’s a lot of humor in the film, deliberately so. When you have dark, you have to have light.”
Actual light was something Rhys Harries says he could have used more of when performing in Clayface’s dripping prosthetics. “I had visibility, albeit limited,” he says. “I had to have a minder who would walk me through sets because these soundstages are pretty dark. So to stop me from walking into the set, I’d occasionally have somebody who was walking with me.”
Ironically, that’s all Clayface wants—to not be alone. But he gets lost in the darkness.
