It was recently reported that the search for Clayface's lead had come down to four actors: Jack O'Connell (28 Years Later), Tom Blyth (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), Leo Woodall (The White Lotus), and George MacKay (1917).
Well, it's turned out to be none of them. DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has confirmed that Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries will take on the title role in Clayface, with The Wrap's Umberto Gonzalez reporting that he'll play the Matt Hagen version of the villain.
While Harries is a relative unknown, he's racked up credits in Apple TV+'s Suspicion, as well as The Return, Kandahar, and The Gentleman.
Born in Cardiff, Wales, Harries attended The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and made his West End stage debut in 2013 in Jez Butterworth's Mojo opposite Colin Morgan, Rupert Grint, and Ben Whishaw.
James Gunn and Peter Safran are producing Clayface alongside The Batman director Matt Reeves. The Life of Chuck filmmaker Mike Flanagan wrote the first draft of the screenplay before Drive scribe Hossein Amini took over. James Watkins (See No Evil) directs.
In the comics, Hagen was the second Clayface, and an adventurer who turned into a monster after encountering a radioactive pool of protoplasm.
That was changed for Batman: The Animated Series, where he was portrayed as an actor who used an anti-ageing cream to look younger. After getting on the wrong side of its creator, Roland Daggett, Hagen is doused in a vat of the stuff and becomes the "classic" Clayface you all know from the comics.
We don't know what this means for Basil Karlo or who the Clayface we saw meet his grisly demise in Creature Commandos last year was.
Talking about Clayface earlier this year, Gunn said, "One of the things Peter and I talked about when we first got the script is if we were producing movies five years ago, like when we were doing Belko Experiment and all of that stuff, and somebody had brought us this horror script called Clayface about this guy, we would have died to have produced this movie."
"Because it was just a really excellent body horror script. And the fact that it's in the DCU is just a plus," he added. "Then we have Clayface: pure [frick]ing horror. Like totally real. Their version of that movie, it is so real and true and psychological and body horror and gross. It's definitely R-rated."
Clayface is currently scheduled to arrive in theaters on September 11, 2026.