‘A tipping point of ickiness’: Welsh star Tom Rhys Harries on playing eyelid-snipping supervillain Clayface
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. “I felt ready to do this,” says Harries. “Had I been younger, I’d have been suffocated by the insecurity of wanting to do a good job but not having that quiet trust in getting there.”
Harries is speaking over video call from the beach-adjacent Los Angeles home he shares with his girlfriend, Amy Allen. 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. “I’ve got a smart shirt on but then these,” he laughs, gesturing to his navy-blue shorts. “Party on the bottom, business on top. 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? “I didn’t.”
His character is rising star Matt Hagen, who has just received his first Oscar nomination when he sleeps with the girlfriend of a razor-wielding mob boss and pays the price. 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. “I’m not interested in the vanity of it.” His looks, he says, “just happen to be an aspect of my work”.
A perceptive actor he may be but it is his otherworldly appearance which grabs you: penetrating eyes, a square, sinewy face, defiant chin and floppy vanilla hair. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? “I don’t know, man,” he says, squirming at the thought of analysing his own appearance. It has been integral, though, to films such as the 2016 folk horror Crow, where he exuded a Bowie-esque alien quality as a woodland-dwelling teenage mystic. “A Bowie-esque alien quality,” he muses. “You’re not the first person to say that. It’s not for me to comment on. I would hit a creative roadblock very quickly if I got too mired in aesthetics.”
Bowie was also a reference point in Harries’s first film role in 2011. Not only was Hunky Dory, starring Minnie Driver as an inspirational teacher, named after one of the singer’s albums, it also boasted a scene in which Harries leads his classmates in a mandolin-and-brass-tinged rendition of The Man Who Sold the World. Screen International singled out Harries as the cast member who “may ultimately become the star here”.
He was oblivious to the buzz. “And yet I’ve got negative reviews seared into my mind.” Proving his point, he quotes one from his early days. “It said, ‘Newcomer Tom Rhys Harries is out of his depth’. I read that and thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to get out of bed today’.”
The son of two teachers at Welsh-language schools, Harries has his parents to thank for being “ahead of the curve” in getting him tested for ADHD at the age of seven. “I don’t think I would be doing this job if I didn’t have ADHD. I notice traits within myself that I think are fairly commonplace with [the condition]. If I’m interested in something, I will hyper-fixate on it. That’s born out of a kind of peacefulness in being able to zero in on one thing because it gives your brain a rest.”
School was a struggle. “I was very naughty. I can really see a fork in the road where, had I not been supported by teachers and mentors, my life could have gone in a different direction.” That realisation instilled in him the need to prove himself. “It’s about repaying those people,” he says.
He “fell into” drama school, aced the audition for Hunky Dory in his first year, went from Bowie to Elvis with Mojo and has been building his career ever since: he took posh-boy roles in the horror-comedy Slaughterhouse Rulez, where he was a boarding-school bully, and the TV kidnapping whodunit Suspicion, opposite Uma Thurman. He went wild as an Ibiza DJ who meets a nasty end in the Netflix murder mystery White Lines, then joined Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche in The Return, a Homer adaptation which pipped The Odyssey to the post.
Still, he has never had a showcase like Clayface. The gooey, grisly special effects may be the main attraction but the movie would count for little without his notes of rage, torment and vulnerability.
There is no escaping the fact, though, that Clayface arrives at a precarious time for any comic book movie not featuring Batman, Spider-Man or the Avengers. Box office disasters such as The Marvels, Joker: Folie à Deux and Supergirl, Clayface’s recent DC Comics stablemate which is predicted to lose more than $100m, indicate that fatigue has set in.
On this matter, Harries’s glass is half full. “That’s what excites me about Clayface,” he says. “It is trying to do something different in a space that is asking for that. The medium needs a shake-up and I hope that people feel they can support the film purely on the basis that it will allow studios the confidence to experiment.”
It seems unlikely, in the wake of the costly Tom Cruise catastrophe Digger and the recent Warner Bros-Paramount merger, that studios will be in the mood to do anything but play it safe, irrespective of whether Clayface triumphs or tanks. “Who’s to say? No one would have expected Backrooms or Obsession to come out of nowhere and do what they did. It’s such an unknown quantity.”
Time will tell if Harries is any kind of industry prognosticator but a star he undoubtedly is. Face it.