‘Clayface’ interview: James Watkins, Tom Rhys Harries, Naomi Ackie and Max Minghella on the horrors of losing your face

As the DC Universe ventures into body horror, the filmmaker and cast of ‘Clayface’ discuss scientific hubris, Hollywood’s beauty-industrial complex, and the existential terror of no longer recognising yourself

Published - October 19, 2026 09:00 am IST

A still from ‘Clayface’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

James Gunn and Peter Safran’s new DC Universe, organised under the ominously biblical banner of “Chapter One: Gods and Monsters”, has so far dedicated a disproportionate amount of time attending to the Gods in question, with Superman and Supergirl each bringing a spot of Kryptonian optimism to the big screen, and the expanding franchise making room for the Green Lantern Corps on television. James Mangold’s forthcoming Swamp Thing should eventually tilt the balance towards the more unsavoury residents of DC’s sprawling bestiary, but James Watkins’ Clayface is getting there first.

Clayface first slimed its way into DC Comics in 1940 when Basil Karlo, a disgraced actor whose career had gone the way of his dignity, turned to murder after professional ruin, before the mythology acquired Matt Hagen, a treasure hunter who gained the ability to reshape his body after exposure to a mysterious substance. James Watkins’ film takes the Hagen route, casting Tom Rhys Harries as a screen actor whose disfigurement threatens the one asset Hollywood has historically valued above talent: a marketable face. With Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini scripting Matt’s catastrophic transformation of comicbook lore, Naomi Ackie plays Dr. Caitlyn Corr, the nanotechnologist whose cellular-renewal research offers Matt a shot at restoring his appearance, while Max Minghella plays John, a Gotham detective caught in the aftermath. With credits including Eden Lake (2008) and Speak No Evil (2024) James now steers the character into darker corners of the DC Universe. Ahead of its theatrical release this week, I chatted with Tom, James, Naomi and Max about bringing Clayface to life.

A behind-the-scenes look at Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen during the production of ‘Clayface’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

With the success and critical acclaim heaped upon Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (2025) and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), the body horror genre has been enjoying a particularly fertile run in the 2020’s, giving filmmakers ample opportunity to interrogate our increasingly deranged relationship with our own bodies. For Clayface, the genre seems custom-built for the material.

Discussing what body horror can express about contemporary anxieties, James identifies “our lack of control or lack of control over our bodies or our bodies betraying us” as one of its most primal sources of dread, arguing that few fears are more universally recognisable than the prospect of our own biology turning against us. He sees urgency in the subject today, given the speed at which artificial intelligence, medicine, bioscience and biomedicine are changing what we can do to the human body, and how little certainty we have about the consequences. “We’re going to be putting stuff in our bodies and it’s going to possibly have a healing effect,” he explains. “It might have an enhancing effect. It might have a transhumanistic effect. We don’t really know.” The sense of uncertainty feeds directly into Matt Hagen’s predicament, as a treatment intended to restore his appearance leaves him confronting a grotesque transformation he cannot fully control. James traces his approach to a recognisable lineage, answering “Cronenberg, Cronenberg, Cronenberg” when asked about his influences before citing John Carpenter, An American Werewolf in London and The Thing; and singling out Cronenberg’s The Fly as his biggest inspiration.

A behind-the-scenes look at director James Watkins and Tom Rhys Harries during the production of ‘Clayface’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

Tom himself approached Matt Hagen’s physical deterioration by researching real-world conditions and considering how each mutation would affect his movement. “You have a character who’s just trying to push through certain obstacles that are physical initially, and then psychological,” he explains. “And then it kind of becomes a question of if the brakes [of impairement] are off what you’re physically able to do, how do you use that? And what will you do to express whatever want and desire you have?”

The prosthetics proved instrumental in developing that physicality, with Tom explaining that “the benefit of having prosthetics, especially when layered on top of you, is that it will kind of tell me what it wants to do.” Rather than merely disguising him, the makeup informed his performance, while he and James continually discussed how Matt’s internal state manifested externally, and vice versa. The technical business of that fell to a combination of prosthetic makeup and digital effects, with hair and makeup supervisor Emmy Beech, designer Nicole Stafford, prosthetic sculptor Francesco Fabiani and Legacy Effects artists Dixie George and Adrian Rigby for the practical work.