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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. It does, as you get to know Rhys Harries a bit better, make sense. He grew up aspiring not to the Oscars but to pro rugby, a sport of uninterrupted play. If you find yourself on the wrong end of a tackle, nobody’s stopping to check on you. The game keeps moving forward, bloody noses and all.
Ahead of the release of Clayface, Rhys Harries tapped in with Men’s Health to discuss his leading man debut, body horror, and why fixing motorcycles helps to keep his head on straight.
MEN’S HEALTH: Was the screening last week your first time seeing Clayface with an audience?
TOM RHYS HARRIES: Yes, it was. I’ve seen it before with just the director [James Watkins] and Naomi [Ackie]. But even with last week’s screening being kind of a small room, yeah, it was my first time.
MH: What was that like? I know a few of us were reacting pretty viscerally to it at times.
TRH: There’s something specific about watching a movie like this in that environment. It would be completely different in a full theater, but there’s something kind of exposing about being in a room with, like, six or seven people. You can’t necessarily feel like you have the license to be vocal, even if you can’t help it at times.
MH: In the last week you’ve celebrated a birthday, seen Clayface with an audience for the first time, and in just a couple of weeks it’s going to hit theaters and most likely change a lot of things for you. What’s the experience of all this happening at once been like?
TRH: I don’t really get too fussed on my birthday. The older I get, I’m like, All right, that’s that. I feel like that with work as well: I’m pretty pragmatic, and I want things to go well for everyone involved. But I kind of want it to be done and out of the way—I like forward motion.
MH: The Matt Hagen/Clayface character—in a film filled with graphic, violent content—is an interesting choice for your blockbuster debut, but it’s been far from an overnight success for you. You’ve worked steadily for the last several years.
TRH: No, but there’s an undeniable aspect of reach here with these studio films. That’s a real thing. Regardless of whether people engage with it and it resonates, you do have wider reach with something like this.
MH: It’s a compelling decision, though—your breakout role coming as an actor who just got his first Oscar nomination and is really starting to cement himself as a movie star. It puts the concept of a leading man and performance under a microscope. What compelled you about Matt as a character and the film’s point of view on performance?
TRH: It’s a pretty multifaceted role. I felt like I was at a point in my career and life where I could meet the requirements of the role and a project like this. I say that with the caveat of knowing that I don’t think I would have been able to handle it when I was younger. I started acting kind of late—I wasn’t a child actor or anything. The role didn’t feel like something that was naturally in my wheelhouse. I had to spend a long time trying to feel as if I understood just a semblance of what it was about. I’m fairly inquisitive and curious, so I have to scratch at something for a long time before I feel like I have a handle on it. Maybe that speaks to an insecurity in me, or maybe it pertains to everyone. But there’s an element of it within us all, that question of Am I qualified to be doing this? It makes you think about yourself and overlaps, in this case, with acting quite a bit. But when you’re in a position like this, there’s just nowhere to hide. I felt like in taking this on I was kind of asking myself, What kind of actor do I want to be? What interests me? You keep going back to that and reviewing it and trying to push yourself, and that’s what I did here. I never want to rest on my laurels, even if that can be pretty seductive.
MH: In exploring those questions, what answers did you find? What interests you as a performer?
TRH: I think about this quite a lot, and ultimately I just feel that being able to do this for a living is such a privilege. And so I always want to ask myself what value I’m bringing to the table. How can I make what I’m doing bigger than this one thing? It has to exist in service to other people. I want to work with actors and writers and directors on projects that have something to say, because my job is to facilitate that and aid that.
MH: That feels not too far removed from something Matt is navigating in the film—how to exist in this rarefied air. What was your first impression of Matt when you read the script, and how did your take on him change as shooting progressed?
TRH: It felt clear early on that the film is concerned with vanity. You’ve got someone who’s navigating the world he’s found himself in and is playing to his strengths. I think what Matt desperately wants is to be additive and good. I know that sounds fairly simple, but when you have these extraordinary worlds and circumstances of comic book and science fiction film, they always work best when they have a firm grasp on the metaphor they’re trying to convey and have a root in something human. We’re able to look at them from a distance and then, at the appropriate time, clock the relevance of what it means to be human in our own world.
MH: There’s a decision the film makes in its approach to Matt that is particularly compelling. In act one he’s the subject of a smear campaign involving allegations of inappropriate behavior with women. The film never makes it clear how much of it is made up vs. how much of it has some root in reality. It adds a particular charge to certain scenes involving Naomi Ackie’s character. Throughout filming, how conscious were you of how Matt would be perceived in this regard, and how much were you tilting the balance in either direction?
TRH: I’m not really a fan of spoon-feeding an audience. One of my favorite films is Prisoners with Jake Gyllenhaal. He plays a cop who’s kind of got the bit between his teeth, but he also has this intricate tattoo that just peeks out from his shirt collar. It’s never explained, but alludes to a past that’s not as straight-laced as his present. Anything like that, within the medium of storytelling, gives the audience license to take ownership and imagine circumstances and color things out however they feel they should be.
Then again, I don’t know how much my thoughts on the issue matter. When people watch the film, they’ll get a snapshot of a man who’s arrived at this pivotal point in his life. Everything he’s done and everything that’s happened to him will be informing the decisions he makes and how he moves through the world. As an artist, I just try to load it up with as much tension as possible.
Rhys Harries in a scene from Clayface.Warner Bros.
MH: You are, and pardon me here, a really handsome guy who took on a role of a handsome guy who gets his face sliced up and then spends a whole lot of the movie under some prosthetic or another. It’s a bit of an unconventional way to spend your blockbuster comic book movie debut, playing around with heavy makeup and gore effects rather than posing with your jawline at the perfect angle. Was this something that drew you to the production, and was there some level of intention in taking on a role that subverts traditional leading man good looks?
TRH: Honestly? I don’t think so. I really struggle with the calculation of thinking about what my next move will be. What I do know is sometimes I’ll read something and be surprised by it, energized by it—I’ll have some sort of reaction and realize it’s something I want to engage with. It just boils down to the story and if there’s something in it that resonates with me for whatever reason.
MH: It’s clear that you have this workmanlike approach to acting. You mentioned earlier not growing up in the industry, and I know you spent most of your young adulthood wanting to be a rugby player. Did growing up around that influence this no-nonsense approach you have now?
TRH: I love doing manual things. Acting, as a profession, is so subjective and internal. There’s no right or wrong approach or solution to it. I haven’t done it in a beat because I’ve been traveling so much, but I ride motorbikes. I love tweaking and tinkering with them because there’s no ambiguity to whether a bike functions or not. It runs or it doesn’t run. If you’ve done an adjustment and something feels off, then you know it’s broken. I’m drawn to counterbalancing things in that way.
It’s easy to get too intellectual or heady and pontificate on the art. And I think ultimately you’re just looking for if something feels right or doesn’t. A lot of the best and brightest actors I’ve worked with are able to just vibe something out. They wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell you how they got there. It’s just trust and instinct and feeling. And I like to counterbalance that experience by, like, pressure-washing the patio, because either you’ve cleaned it or you haven’t. There’s nothing to pontificate on there.
MH: You mentioned the practicality of working on bikes and how they either work or they don’t. Is that a pull from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
TRH: Absolutely, yeah. I’m really fortunate to have people who have sort of been mentors to me or are just a little older, and one of my go-to touchstone people gave me that book when I was about 21. I also—I don’t want to get into the weeds with this because it could sound so pretentious—but I came across a Nietzsche book around the same time because I was doing a play with Nietzsche in it. So it was another weird counterbalance of the sort of gentle pondering of Zen and then having this book of nihilistic philosophy in my life all at once. I don’t know what kind of damage that must have done to me, reading those at such a young age.
It kind of draws back to Clayface, because so much of this movie is about what’s hardwired into our systems and what surfaces when we’re exposed to certain things at certain ages. Matt was exposed to violence at a really young age, and I believe violence is taught. That really interested me—he gains this new set of powers and with them the capacity to express himself in ways he’s never had access to before. So, on some level, he’s reverting back to a 7-year-old child and the violence he was taught then.
MH: What kind of bike do you have?
TRH: I don’t have one currently, but I’ve had a bunch over the years. My favorite was this matte black Harley that I was kicking about on the outskirts of London. I was in my 20s and saw someone drive through the streets of London on one, and then eight or nine years later, I could finally afford one of my own. I’ve also got loads of vintage Harley shirts and merchandise, but I feel like a fraud, because I haven’t owned one for a hot second now. I feel a bit fraudulent at the moment! I do have a license and I have had a Harley though, I promise.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Photographs: Austin Hargrave
Styling: Wendi & Nicole
Styling Assistants: Lilac David, Tiffany Tucker & Leora Ramirez
Grooming: Candice Birns
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