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

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.

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. 

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. 

Though these brilliant artists are responsible for defining the Clayface look, Matt Hagen’s transformation in the film is orchestrated by Naomi’s Dr. Caitlyn Corr, a nanotechnologist researching cellular renewal who uses Matt to test her discoveries after his face is disfigured. Caitlyn is a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, convinced that science can repair the human body without necessarily accounting for the repurcussions. With longevity science and biohacking fuelling a cultural obsession with extending life and optimising our bodies, I asked Naomi whether Caitlyn reflects contemporary anxieties about how far we should go.

“With all the peptides and all of that, it would be a complete horror story if everyone turned out to be zombies in 10 years,” she jokes, before getting to the crux of Caitlyn’s work: “There’s a lot of danger when you’re playing with nature.” Naomi herself prefers a decidedly less experimental approach to longevity: “You should try and just eat your veggies and keep it at that, drink some water, keep it simple.”

Best known for playing Nick Blaine in The Handmaid’s Tale, Max plays a Gotham detective named John, who is caught up in the fallout of Caitlyn’s experiments. Having directed Shell (2024), a body-horror film starring Elisabeth Moss and Kate Hudson, I was curious whether his own experience of making the film influenced his approach to Clayface. “The honest answer is not really,” he says. “Clayface was so exciting to me on so many levels, not just because of the genre elements, but because of James, Naomi, Tom and this incredible cast.” 

He describes the production as “incredibly intimate and collaborative” and says that from his first conversation with Watkins, it was obvious the film would be “a really special experience.” Max also reveals that he and Naomi are both self-confessed DC nerds. “For some reason, these stories have always resonated with me and seeped into my subconscious,” he says, explaining why stepping into this universe felt like a natural fit.

In the age of Ozempic and an obsessive culture around body image fueling further dysmorphia, Matt Hagen’s determination to repair his disfigured face speaks to more of these modern horrors. But while his fixation might appear extreme, Naomi argues that the pressures driving it are not exclusively about appearance. Asked how gender shapes the industry’s expectations around looks, ageing and maintaining a marketable body, she says, “I think men in general outside of the industry, but definitely inside as well, especially now, deal with so much pressure to uphold a look that appeals to as wide an audience as possible”. Though she contends that for men, body image has more to do with status, Naomi explains how for women, “your looks can become currency — like an amount you can spend in the world to try and achieve a level of privilege that gets you access to certain things”. 

In Matt’s case, she argues, the real devastation goes beyond losing his face: “This is someone who grew up poor, in a home that wasn’t ideal and worked his way up to a status where he would be applauded for who he was and what he had to share with the world. And all that just disappears. When faced with something like that, I don’t know if I can separate it according to gender. I think anyone in that position would feel the disappointment and urgency that Matt Hagen feels”.

The myriad horrors of Clayface also inevitably tap into current anxieties about screen actors losing control over their faces and images, with the influx of AI and digital manipulation in the industry. Asked what he personally finds terrifying about being an actor today, Tom admits, “I’m always scared of everything. But I think you wouldn’t be hard pressed to find actors who are feeling anxious about… anything. It’s a precarious profession to pursue.” The physical and emotional demands of the role have certainly left their mark. “I’ve still not recovered, I’m not sure I ever will,” he says. “It would mean a great deal to me if everybody went to see the film, because I left a bit of my soul there.”

Clayface releases in Indian theatres on October 23