James Watkins did not simply cast Tom Rhys Harries in Clayface. He put him through the wringer first. In a wide-ranging conversation ahead of the film's October 21 release, the director explained that the Welsh actor had to earn the role of Matt Hagen the hard way, enduring a gruelling audition process that left no doubt about who should carry the comic-book tragedy.
"I auditioned the hell out of him," Watkins said. "There was no version of this where I handed him the part because he looked right or because the timing worked out. He had to show me he could hold every fractured piece of this man in his hands at once."
That insistence on rigor should come as little surprise to anyone who has followed Watkins' career. The London-born filmmaker has spent years building a reputation for lean, unnerving genre work, from Eden Lake to The Woman in Black to Speak No Evil, and he approaches comic-book material with the same unsentimental eye he brings to psychological horror. Clayface, despite its superhero-adjacent title, is being positioned not as a cape-and-cowl spectacle but as a horror, thriller and science-fiction hybrid, and Watkins has been vocal about treating the source material as a character study first.
A Fall From Grace, Then Something Far Stranger
The film traces the meteoric rise of Matt Hagen, a Gotham street kid who claws his way to Hollywood leading-man status, only to have his life shattered when a local crime boss's actions leave him horribly disfigured. Abandoned by his own team and stripped of everything he built, Hagen turns to a cutting-edge treatment that, against all odds, restores him to his former self. The miracle comes with a catch. The procedure also destabilizes his grip on reality, sending him spiraling down a path of all-consuming revenge.
It is a premise that demands an actor capable of playing at least three distinct registers: the hungry young striver, the broken and discarded victim, and the increasingly unmoored figure who emerges from the treatment. Watkins said that range was precisely what the audition was designed to test.
"You need someone who can be genuinely charming and then genuinely terrifying, and who can make you feel the loss in between," he said. "Tom understood that the horror doesn't come from the makeup or the effects. It comes from watching a person you loved at the start of the film become someone you're afraid of by the end."
Harries, a Welsh stage and screen actor, has spent the past several years steadily assembling an eclectic résumé, and Clayface hands him the kind of dual-register showcase that can define a career. He leads a cast that includes Naomi Ackie as Caitlyn Corr, Eddie Marsan, Max Minghella as John Borrelli, David Dencik, Francesca Corney, Ruby Sear as Theresa, and Wil Coban as Bones - a deep bench of character actors that suggests Watkins is aiming for texture and grit rather than glossy spectacle.
Horror DNA, Comic-Book Scale
At 108 minutes, Clayface is notably lean for a Hollywood genre release, and Watkins' horror pedigree has shaped how the project has been marketed. The studio is selling it as a horror-thriller with science-fiction underpinnings, which fits the director's long-stated interest in stories about ordinary people pushed past their psychological breaking points. Hagen's transformation - miraculous on the surface, corrosive underneath - reads as a natural extension of that preoccupation, even as it arrives wrapped in the iconography of Gotham's criminal underworld.
The early signals are strong. The film currently sits at 8.583 out of 10 on TMDb, a number that will inevitably settle as more audiences weigh in but that nonetheless suggests the material has landed with viewers who have seen it. Watkins, for his part, seems less interested in the metrics than in the performance at the center of the movie.
"I've been on sets where everyone is comfortable and the work is fine," he said. "I didn't want fine. I wanted someone who would fight for it. Tom fought for it, and then he delivered something I don't think either of us fully anticipated."
Clayface arrives in theaters on October 21, 2026.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
