Exactly 13 years ago this month, Tom Rhys Harries was hanging by his ankles from a meat hook every night. Playing a teenage rock’n’roll idol abducted by gangsters in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Harries was fresh out of drama school and the only unknown in a cast led by Ben Whishaw and Rupert Grint. The Guardian’s Michael Billington likened him to “an embryonic Elvis”.
Now the 36-year-old Cardiff-born actor has the title role in Clayface, a violent DC Comics supervillain blockbuster set in Batman’s stomping ground, Gotham City. This puts him in the company of fellow Brits in the comic-book universe, such as Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Robert Pattinson (Batman) and David Jonsson, recently announced as the new Black Panther. She is the professional musician of the two: songwriter of the year at the Grammys two years running, no less, for her work with Sabrina Carpenter and others.
It is Harries, though, who is giving rock star this morning, even all this time after Mojo, in his grey denim shirt with a silver chain against tanned skin and assorted silver rings on his fingers. Stadium-rocker pomposity, however, is in short supply. Standing up to shut the door, he draws attention to his fashion faux pas.
Classic Zoom.” Harries has earned the right to relax. He spent three months auditioning to play the severely mutilated protagonist of Clayface for producers James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Matt Reeves (The Batman). How did he stay sane all that time?
His face slashed to ribbons and his career in tatters, Matt’s only hope lies with scientist Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie) and her miracle serum. This restores his good looks and gives him the power to change his appearance at will but comes with unstable side effects. In one scene, his eyelids melt, forcing him to snip away at the resulting sticky mess with a pair of nail scissors.
Described by Harries as “the film’s tipping point of ickiness”, it is a moment that will be triggering for any conjunctivitis sufferers and plain disgusting for everyone else. Closer to horror than anything in the superhero canon, Clayface is a cross between Darkman, in which Liam Neeson is a disfigured scientist who creates synthetic faces, and The Substance, the Demi Moore gross-out satire on ageing, vanity and celebrity. Despite being a pretty-boy actor playing a pretty-boy actor, Harries shrugs off any personal resonance in his own film about losing face.
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