Clayface arrives in theaters Friday, October 23, and it takes one of Batman's stranger villains in a surprisingly intimate direction. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, a jobbing actor whose overnight rise to Hollywood leading man ends when a local crime boss leaves him disfigured. Abandoned by the people around him, he chases an experimental treatment that restores his face, only for it to unravel his sense of self instead.
The script began with Mike Flanagan, who wrote Clayface as his way into the DC Universe before stepping back to focus on other work, including his Prime Video adaptation of Carrie. James Watkins, who directed the Speak No Evil remake, took the film over from there, with Hossein Amini reworking the screenplay. Flanagan has said plainly that the finished film is not really his anymore. He handed in a script he loved and had not seen what Watkins made of it, which makes Clayface an unusually public example of a writer stepping away before a film he started ever reaches an audience.
Naomi Ackie plays the scientist whose treatment sets Hagen's transformation in motion, with Eddie Marsan and Max Minghella rounding out a cast built around one man's unraveling rather than a wider superhero plot. It is the third film under the DC Universe banner that James Gunn and Peter Safran are building, produced alongside Matt Reeves, and it leans into body horror rather than spectacle.
Picking a C-list Batman villain for a major studio horror release drew some early skepticism online, and Gunn pushed back directly, arguing that genuine inspiration behind a story matters more than how recognizable the character already is. That confidence shows in how Clayface has been sold: trailers lean hard into practical-feeling transformation effects rather than teasing a wider crossover. Anyone curious what Harries does under all that latex should catch it on the big screen, where the body horror is clearly built to land.
