Mike Flanagan Was Inspired by One of the Best Batman Stories Ever for Clayface

As fitting his shape-shifting abilities, Clayface is one of DC’s most malleable characters. Appearing in everything from DC Comics to the television series Gotham to the recent Batman 1989 continuation novels, Clayface has changed his shape, his personality, and even his secret identity to meet the needs of whatever story he’s in.

So when writer Mike Flanagan pitched James Gunn a solo film based on the long-running villain, he had plenty of places to look for inspiration. And he found it in not just one of the most universally beloved incarnations of Batman, but in perhaps the greatest Clayface story of all time. At a Motor City Comic Con panel (via Popverse), Flanagan revealed that his idea, “went all the way back to Feat of Clay, that incredible [Batman: The Animated Series] two-parter with Ron Perlman voicing the character, which was so formative for me as a kid.”

Written by comic book legend Marv Wolfman and Michael Reaves, and directed by Dick Sebast and Kevin Altieri, “Feat of Clay” first aired in September 1992. The two-parter pit Batman against Matt Hagen (Perlman), a formerly famous actor whose career fell off after a disfiguring auto accident. Thanks to an experimental and highly-addictive drug called Renuyu, Hagen can reshape his facial features which, combined with his gifts as an actor, allow him to mimic almost anyone. To maintain his Renuyu supply, Hagen goes to work for gangster Roland Dagget, but when the latter decides that he’s a liability, Clayface goes on a rampage that Batman has to quelle.

Like the classic “Heart of Ice,” “Feat of Clay” takes a formally silly character and embues him with surprising pathos. That pathos came surprising late in Clayface’s existence, having first appeared in 1940’s Detective Comics #40, in the Bill Finger-penned story “The Murders of Clayface.” That story introduced Clayface as Basil Karlo, a horror actor who became so obsessed with a role that he began acting out the character’s kills in real life. Twenty-one years later, Finger introduced the Matt Hagen version of Clayface in Detective Comics #298, drawn by Sheldon Moldoff as the giant mud monster that has become his standard look.

That mud monster look was one that Clayface had in his previous DCU appearance, as a adolescent-minded buffoon (voiced by Alan Tudyk) who masqueraded as a professor in the animated series Creature Commandos. That take has little of the depth that The Animated Series gave the character, the type of depth that has long been Flanagan’s calling card. While there will certainly be some of that complexity in the upcoming film, in which Tom Rhys Harries plays Hagen, Flanagan will be ceding the director’s chair to James Watkins, most recently of the delightfully goofy Speak No Evil remake.

Flanagan told the Motor City Comic Con attendees that he would have prefered to direct the film as will, as he did with the films Doctor Sleep and The Life of Chuck or episodes of his Netflix series such as Midnight Mass. “It was one of the great kind of sadnesses of my career that I’m so sorry that when it came time to make it, and they wanted to make this movie right away, I wasn’t available,” he explained. “I was like, ‘I have to go make Carrie [for Amazon]. There’s nothing I can do.'”

So Flanagan had to change his plans to get Clayface made. But changes are what Clayface is all about.

Clayface appears in theaters on September 11, 2026.