From Autumn Issue 2026
Glass Man speaks to Clayface star Tom Rhys Harries about his biggest role to date, getting into character and the communal power of horror
It’s extremely hot outside when Tom Rhys Harries arrives in Stoke Newington dressed entirely in white linen. He looks like the human embodiment of freshly laundered bed sheets. Much like Harries himself – bright, gentle and so immediately comforting that you feel marginally sleepier in his presence.
Eight hours later, a pot of olives sits open in front of him at the pub across the road from the studio. He’s relaxed, slightly tired and already drawing the occasional glance, although nobody appears entirely certain why they are looking. For now, the 33-year-old actor can still occupy a quiet corner of an East London pub without the room rearranging itself around him.
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
That anonymity has an expiry date, though. Harries has been cast as the title character in Clayface, DC Studios’ body horror origin story about one of Batman’s oldest adversaries. It’s the biggest professional moment of his life and he has no intention of pretending otherwise:
“Dude, I’ve been trusted to play the lead in the origin story of one of DC’s biggest characters. I’m not going to pretend that I’m cool about this. Nobody even knows who the fuck I am.”
Not yet.
Clayface, for the uninitiated, is a shapeshifter whose malleable body can assume almost any face or form. In James Watkins’ film, Harries plays Matt Hagen, a rising actor whose catastrophic facial disfigurement and attempt to recover what he has lost transform him into Clayface.
The space between being selected and being recognised looks remarkably ordinary for Harries: a quiet pub, an equally exhausted journalist armed with five references to Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche and F Scott Fitzgerald, and not a single functioning piece of recording equipment between them.
In short, my phone overheats and I quote three dead men at him in a single sentence. Harries takes the device with the calm authority of someone handling a minor production crisis, gets up and glances back. “I’m going to put this on ice.” My face drops. Condensation exists, although this concern comes from a journalist who once put an overheated laptop in the freezer. Harries returns with the phone intact and, evidently, a firmer grasp of thermodynamics.
We leave it on the shaded floor but it’s too far away. I retrieve the phone and place it on his lap, directly beneath the sun. He looks at me, straight-faced. “Adina, if you put it on me, it’s obviously going to overheat again.” He holds the expression for a beat. “Mainly because of me.” Then he laughs at his own joke.
I move the phone away before deciding whether to throw it at him or not. This rather ruins any attempt to present Harries as the coolest thing in the room, although he may still be the least likely to combust. He is excitable, intellectually restless and inclined to follow one idea until it collides with three others. And right now, his entire life is overheating. The temperature, at least, is familiar. Before Clayface, there was another heatwave.
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
In Netflix’s White Lines, Harries played Axel Collins, the charismatic and destructive centre of a mystery unfolding in Ibiza. Already dead when the story begins, Axel is less a stable person than a succession of impressions, reconstructed through the memories of those who loved, resented and misunderstood him. Harries plays him as pure appetite, forever searching for the next experience, the next crowd and the next boundary to cross. Around him, the island appears to burn.
Axel belonged to Ibiza’s heat and hedonism. The actor who created him was shaped in a cooler place and was considerably more disciplined. Born in Cardiff, raised in a Welsh-speaking community and trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Harries built his career across theatre, television and film long before DC placed his face at the centre of a franchise.
That discipline becomes clearest on stage. In Jamie Lloyd’s stripped-back production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, opposite Emilia Clarke, Harries played the celebrated writer Trigorin. Chekhov can make death feel preferable to another declaration of unrequited love, and in the wrong hands, the fourth act becomes an endurance test for everyone involved. Harries does not drop you.
His magnetism was neither loud nor aggressively theatrical. His Trigorin was successful but unsure of himself, desirable without appearing comfortable with being desired, and quietly bewildered by the life others imagined he controlled. Harries held the audience through stillness, long after a less assured performer might have surrendered it to the accumulating Russian despair.
Then came Apple TV+’s Suspicion opposite Uma Thurman, and a succession of roles that allowed him to move between volatility and restraint, charm and threat, visibility and disappearance. The apparent contradictions are not accidental. Harries speaks about acting as a profession through which, in an ideal world, each project reveals something new about the person undertaking it.
“If you’re going to engage with a profession like acting, in an idealised world, you get to engage with characters that ultimately teach you something about yourself,” he reflects.
That philosophy has carried him to a character for whom acting, transformation and identity become horrifyingly literal.
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
Clayface first appeared in 1940, only a year after Batman. Since then, the character has moved through multiple names, bodies and moral classifications, appearing variously as criminal, monster, victim, tragic antihero or some unstable combination of them all.
“There are so many different characters,” Harries concurs. “Preston Payne, Matt Hagen, Basil Karlo. I hope we’ve taken the most interesting elements of all the different versions to present a definitive origin story from that long line.”
Perhaps the most fitting element of this new origin story is the man chosen to inhabit it. Harries’ anonymity is not a risk to the casting. It’s the logic of it. Matt Hagen is an actor desperate to become visible and fixed in other people’s imaginations. Harries is standing immediately before that happens to him. The symmetry is almost suspiciously perfect. But does that bring a particular responsibility? “No more responsibility than I have towards the creatives involved in our film and towards the fans of that universe, because it’s for them,” he replies. For all the attention inevitably focused on the person whose face will appear on the poster, Harries treats filmmaking as a community.
He names the people who built Matt alongside him. “Keith Madden, the costume designer, and I really worked together on building out Matt’s costume. I was on board about three months before anybody else, so that was an amazing undertaking and collaborative effort. Emma Neville, my dresser, was brilliant. Lottie Betts, my personal make-up artist, was incredible. I wouldn’t have been able to do the shoot without Lottie. Nicole Stafford, the hair and make-up designer, had just come off Hamnet and did such a phenomenal job,” he mentions gratefully.
“We had so much agency. It was a studio feature with the agency of an independent film, and the rope DC and Warner Bros. gave us was massive. I can’t really think of anything professionally that’s much more fulfilling than that.”
He speaks with immediate warmth about former Glass cover star Naomi Ackie, whom he describes as “one of the best working actresses of our time”. Ackie plays Caitlyn Corr, the scientist Matt turns to after his disfigurement, setting his transformation in motion.
“I think we had a similar approach to the work, which was to stay curious and open and keep the lines of communication open with James and each other,” Ackie says. “The main thing was making sure that we were both on the same page and really comfortable with each other, so we could get the best performances out of one another.”
That trust made the moments when Matt replaced Harries all the more disquieting. “There were quite a few moments where he turned,” she continues. “Tom is such an incredible imitator and obviously that is super important for this role, but there were moments when I, as Caitlyn, had to observe him change internally from Matt into Clayface. It’s really hard to perform a character’s mental descent, and Tom had his finger completely on the pulse of Matt. He’s made him heartbreakingly human and relatable.”
The transformation could happen in an instant. “Tom is such a lovely, chatty guy, and then suddenly his voice would drop, and his eyes would go super intense. It was quite scary, and then James would say ‘cut’ and he was back to normal,” she recalls.
Harries remembers the production rather differently. “The best day of shooting was the day production told me that Robert Pattinson would be in it as well,” he says. “The worst day was when they told me they were cutting out all of his scenes.”
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
I may have overstated the frequency of his serious moments. Yet beneath his jokes lies a film that keeps returning to a particular kind of loss. Matt’s body is not merely part of his identity. As an actor, it’s his creative instrument, his livelihood and the means through which he makes himself understood. When his physical capacities are destroyed, he loses far more than a face: relationships, community, independence, the life built around them. It’s a particular kind of grief and one rarely discussed – the loss of a creative self because the body can no longer sustain it.
The cruelty is that Matt can physically become anything he imagines except for his former self. His search for identity, belonging and connection becomes inseparable from survival, and the danger lies in what desperation can make permissible when someone believes everything has been taken from them. “Self-preservation plays a part in that,” Harries reflects. “I think it’s remarkable what human beings are capable of doing when they’re desperate.”
To understand what remained of Matt as his body became unstable, Harries began with something resolutely tactile. He kept a journal. He pulls out his phone and shows me photographs of its pages. The handwriting is controlled but almost adolescent. There are fragments, drawings and sudden intrusions of colour. The pages change as Matt changes. The journal is less a conventional character biography than a record of competing ego states.
“When I was shooting, I would approach each scene by asking, ‘Where is he now?’” Harries explains. “Because that’s unconscious, right? Is he eight years old? Is he 14? Is he 27? Where is he meeting this current challenge?”
Matt’s body may eventually become capable of assuming almost any form, but Harries found him through the selves he had already been. His transformation begins long before the clay:
“What you have is an individual who, from a very young age, has shown great determination and resilience. The fact that he has built a life for himself, given where he has come from, is admirable. When a new set of challenges confronts him, that same resilience is what he leans on for survival.”
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
Harries continues, “You want to sow the seeds of someone capable of what he ultimately ends up being capable of doing. I think violence is taught and he has been trying to run away from it his entire life. Then he is backed into a corner where he regresses to his conditioning.”
Resilience is usually discussed as though it were inherently virtuous. Clayface appears more interested in what happens when the same quality that once saved someone begins enabling the choices that threaten to destroy them. Aggression is treated as active and grief as passive, although human beings carry both at once. “As I get older, I find that two things can be true at the same time,” Harries says. “Human beings are not binary and we don’t operate in primary colours.”
There’s a point at which that tension crosses into something irreversible: “There’s a certain Rubicon that’s crossed. In the pursuit of that identity, there’s a certain loss of humanity and an unconscious crossing of a moral and ethical boundary. Then, he isn’t able to go back to his old self in any capacity because he’s a new person.
Harries adds, “When you’re playing someone, you’re constantly seeking justification for their actions, whatever they are, so you’re not viewing them objectively. I’m not viewing them objectively. I can’t, really. Inevitably, when you spend enough time with somebody and try to get under the skin of their motivations, life and actions, your objectivity dwindles anyway. Labels are pretty reductive.”
On a roll, he goes on: “It’s just not my job. That’s the audience’s job. I’m intrigued to see at which point, if at all, the audience goes, ‘That’s too far’.”
The refusal to classify Matt is not evasive. It’s an invitation. Harries believes that film becomes alive when the viewer enters the question rather than receiving an answer. “I think what’s really strong about Clayface as a character and the foundation of the film is that it’s steeped in different metaphors and things people will be able to relate to,” he says.
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
“He is fantastical, and then it’s down to your interpretation. I don’t think it’s interesting for me to reveal that to you or say, ‘This is what it is’. Film, television and plays are participatory. That’s where it lives. That’s where it becomes conversations, thoughts and feelings within us.”
Interpretation may be individual but horror is collective. “Horror is a genre that’s meant to be experienced in the cinema because it’s a communal experience,” Harries says. Fear changes in proximity to other people. Bodies recoil, laugh or look away together. Somewhere within that response, each person decides where sympathy ends.
What the experience meant to Harries remains less certain. “I’m still figuring that out,” he remarks. “It’s still seeding. I still don’t know anything.”
Fitzgerald located intelligence in the ability to hold opposing ideas without becoming paralysed by them. Harries appears comfortable within that tension. He can believe that Clayface is the opportunity of his life while refusing to pretend that opportunity guarantees anything. He can speak confidently about the decisions that brought him here, then dismantle the idea that certainty survives forever.
“I feel like life goes in cycles,” he says. “You think you’ve completely figured it out and then you realise you don’t know anything. And that just repeats forever.”
What Harries can define is the life beyond work. “Obviously, you want to do good work and be good at your job because that seems additive in some kind of way,” he says. “But ultimately, I just want to be the best son, best partner and best friend I can be. Everything else is noise.”
For him, authenticity is not a fixed virtue. It’s the distance between intention and behaviour, monitored through constant reflection.
“It’s really hard to keep a short leash on it,” he says.
“If the intention is there, then the leash is already tight,” I say. “That’s what you’re moving towards, isn’t it?”
“That’s the hope.”
“You’re not going to be an asshole if you intend to be authentic and kind.”
“What if you’re authentically an asshole?”
“I keep forgetting that’s an actual possibility.”
“Assholes are a thing,” he says. “But do assholes think they’re assholes?”
by Adina Ilie
Clayface is out in theatres on 30 October 2026
Photographer: Jason Hetherington
Stylist: Nathan Henry
Grooming: Josh Knight using CHARLOTTE TILBURY BEAUTY for skin
Photography assistant: Alfie Bungay
Styling assistant: Livi Creighton
Talent: Tom Rhys Harries
Look 1: FERRAGAMO
Look 2: CELINE
Look 3: Juste un Clou ring in 18K white gold CARTIER, Jacket GIVENCHY, Top STRETCH FRAISE
Look 4: Tank Américaine small watch in 18K rose gold with quartz movement and leather strap and LOVE bracelet in 18K yellow gold, both CARTIER, Shirt and trousers LOUIS VUITTON, Tie CENCI
Look 5: Tank Américaine small watch in 18K rose gold with quartz movement and leather strap CARTIER, Clothing FENDI, Belt J&M DAVIDSON
Look 6: Jacket, shirt and tie FERRAGAMO, Trousers BLUE BLUE, Belt CELINE