The British director behind Clayface tells PTI he built DC's first villain-led film around Matt Hagen's descent, not the industry he works in.
James Watkins wants one thing understood about Clayface before anyone sees a frame of it. Yes, it's set in Hollywood. No, it isn't about Hollywood.
Speaking to PTI, the director said the pull of the project was the character arc buried inside the horror. "One of the things that most appealed to me was that notion of a tragic journey of this character," Watkins said, describing how the film tracks a man named Matt Hagen turning into the villain Clayface. "This understanding of him and his journey and how he goes from being Matt Hagen to Clayface."
Tom Rhys Harries plays Hagen, who survives a brutal attack on his face, undergoes a surgery meant to fix him, and ends up with side effects that are a lot worse than the injury. His body starts turning into living clay. Watkins called it "a really fascinating and extreme journey" and said his whole approach once he signed on was to dig into every beat of that transformation from Hagen's point of view.
"I wanted it to be a story about just a regular guy that everyone can relate to," he said, pushing back on the idea that the Hollywood setting makes this an industry story in disguise.
That's a deliberate swerve from how DC has handled its villains before. Joker went the psychological-thriller route in 2019 and picked up awards buzz doing it. Clayface, the studio's first film built entirely around a villain in its new slate, is going somewhere messier. This is body horror, full stop, with the emphasis on what happens to a man's physical self once the surgery goes wrong.
The pedigree behind the camera is hard to ignore. The script comes from Mike Flanagan, who built an entire career on dread with The Haunting of Hill House, working alongside Hossein Amini. Matt Reeves, who directed The Batman, is producing, and he's joined by DC Studios' co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. That's a lot of people with strong, distinct instincts for tone signing off on the same script.
What Watkins hasn't said yet is how far the body horror goes, or how the studio plans to position Clayface against its own superhero output once it lands in theatres. DC hasn't confirmed a release date for the film in this round of interviews, and that's the detail fans will keep chasing as production news trickles out. For now, the only certainty is that Watkins is betting the film works because Hagen feels human first and monstrous second.
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