Clayface Director James Watkins on the Tragic Ending, a Hidden Knee Injury and Working With DC Studios

Clayface has given its team reason to celebrate. The DC Studios release earned $46.5 million worldwide in its opening weekend, edging past its $44 million production budget, and it holds a Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics gave it 75 percent, while verified audience members rated it 94 percent. It also earned an A- CinemaScore, which is rare for a horror film. For director James Watkins, the response is a welcome payoff after a difficult production.

Watkins won the job by building on a phrase from original screenwriter Mike Flanagan, who called his script "a tragedy in three acts." The director pitched DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran a story about actor Matt Hagen's slow transformation into Batman's malleable, monstrous foe. His body-horror ideas reportedly made Gunn, a horror veteran, wince. Watkins' earlier work, including Eden Lake and his 2024 American remake of Speak No Evil, shows a comfort with bleak endings.

A personal loss shadowed post-production. Watkins' father, Dr. George Watkins CBE, died suddenly, and the film is dedicated to him. Gunn and Safran gave the director time away, much as they did for producer Matt Reeves during a private family crisis amid work on The Batman Part II. "James and Peter reached out and afforded me time and were very kind at a point when there was a film to finish," Watkins said. "So I'll never forget that."

Watkins also pitched the story as one about losing identity and livelihood. In the film, a mobster disfigures Hagen's face just as his acting career is peaking. Off screen, star Tom Rhys Harries was hiding a torn ACL so it would not cost him a career-altering role. The filmmakers learned of it while shooting the sequence in which Matt flees a movie premiere and is hit by a car. Harries still did the jump and the fall, but the team adjusted the stunt to avoid a lasting injury. Watkins said that knowing earlier would not have changed his casting, because Harries was "absolutely the right actor for the role."

The story follows Hagen to Dr. Caitlyn Corr, played by Naomi Ackie, who treats him with experimental AI nanocells meant to regenerate damaged tissue. The results are astonishing at first, but negative emotions trigger side effects. When his new face melts at a premiere he crashed to gloat before his former agent and collaborators, he returns to her lab and overdoses on the treatment. That turns him into a volatile shapeshifter whose weak impulse control is further exploited by the nanites.

His vengeance peaks at a nightclub owned by the mob boss who cut his face. Watkins devised the set piece late in the rewrite process, working with Hossein Amini, with whom he previously created McMafia. He cited Robin Hood films and El Cid, where heroes storm a castle. "I wanted to give the audience permission to enjoy the payback," he said, so the ending could then turn against that satisfaction.

The turn comes when Matt kills Caitlyn's fiancé, Gotham PD Detective John Borelli, played by Max Minghella. Watkins said the act is driven less by fear of arrest than by the nanites taking over, mixed with an obsession with the doctor who treated him. "It doesn't mean we have to like it, but he's acting out of some combination of self-defense, love and a weird obsession," Watkins said. "He's just gone at that point."

Watkins also addressed Flanagan's script. He said the finished film stays very much in line with it, but argued that no script is truly locked, since sets, locations, actors and editing all reshape it. On the practical side, he said prosthetic resets were often quoted at 45 minutes but usually took about 30, and that Harries' contact lenses and makeup limited how long the team could work.