This article was featured in MH Flex, our monthly newsletter recommending the one in-depth interview you need to flex your pop culture knowledge. Sign up here to get it first. A FEW DAYS before we speak, Tom Rhys Harries turned 34 years old—and by his own admission, he didn’t make too big a deal out of it.
Rhys Harries prefers not to dwell on the past and, beyond that, only spends so much time thinking about the present; his focus is often on what comes next. Still, he’s facing down an October full of milestones, and with them a press cycle full of questions about the comic book character he’s brought to life. A few short weeks after his birthday, the biggest project of his acting career will hit theaters: Clayface, the most experimental outing yet in James Gunn’s quasi-rebooted DC Universe and Rhys Harries’s debut as a blockbuster leading man.
The film is the sort of project fans have been begging Marvel and DC alike to take on for ages: a lower-budget exploration of a character (in this case, one best known as a Batman villain) through a real genre lens. And make no mistake, Clayface commits to the horror genre wholeheartedly. It is a gnarly, hard-R-rated body horror joint that had the audience at our small early screening squirming (Rhys Harries quietly joined in the back, the first time he’d seen the film with a proper audience of any kind).
At the center of a cast featuring Naomi Ackie, Max Minghella, and Eddie Marsan is Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen, an actor on the cusp of superstardom whose career is derailed by a vicious attack from Gotham City mobsters. An experimental treatment provided by Ackie’s character begins to restore balance to his life, only to spur on a further descent into mutation and madness. There are certainly parallels between Matt’s budding stardom and the position Rhys Harries finds himself in now, one where any future restaurant birthday dinners might come with a side of craning necks and iPhone camera flashes.
It’s the sort of perpetual perception that pushes Matt’s life further and further off course in the film. But Rhys Harries seems, for his part, unfazed by all this. When we speak on a sunny Sunday morning in Los Angeles, he’s in his home getting ready for a day of press.
In talking about the film and his craft, he’s straightforward and thoughtful, completely devoid of frivolity or sound bite answers. It is—and I mean this as a compliment—very difficult to imagine him answering a series of canned “This or That” questions for a TikToker or YouTube channel. He lights up when talking about literature, motorcycles, the work of other filmmakers, and seems hesitant to center himself even when talking about the film he’s in.
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