Look at the two of them next to each other and try to make it make sense.
On one side: the just-dropped trailer for James Watkins’ “Clayface,” a $40 million R-rated body-horror movie produced by Matt Reeves and scripted by Mike Flanagan. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen as a tragic, beautiful Hollywood hopeful — bandaged, bloodied, melting his own face off in a bathtub like an A24 Cronenberg riff. The trailer is shot like a David Lynch fever dream. Gunn himself has called it “a complete horror film.” The poster looks like “The Substance” in a Halloween mask.
On the other side: the Matt Hagen we already met. The Clayface from Season 1 of “Creature Commandos” is a lumpy, snaggle-toothed cartoon glob of taupe play-doh who burps in his car, plays “Mortal Kombat 1” on a Series X he stole off a murdered woman, and shapeshifts into a college professor specifically so he can ask a class of confused students for their thoughts on lesbians. Alan Tudyk voices him as exactly the kind of vulgar, incompetent menace that voice sounds like.
A viral tweet making the rounds this week put the two images side by side and basically asked: what universe are we even in?
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The frustrated response from a lot of fans has been some variation of “Creature Commandos shouldn’t have been in the DCU.” That’s the wrong read. They are the same character. You are watching the entire arc of one person collapsing across two different mediums, and “Clayface” the movie is the front half of the story.
Here’s how to fit it together.
They Are Both, Officially, Matt Hagen
This is not a soft retcon or a “spiritual” connection. The DCU Wiki entry for the “Creature Commandos” Clayface explicitly identifies him as “Matthew ‘Matt’ Hagen,” a former aspiring actor from Gotham City who suffered a brutal attack that disfigured him and ruined his acting future, then underwent an experimental transformative procedure that turned him into a metahuman shapeshifter. That is, beat for beat, the synopsis Warner Bros. released for the 2026 movie: “DC Studios’ first-ever foray into the genre, ‘Clayface’ is a riveting horror thriller… Clayface unravels one man’s horrifying descent from rising Hollywood star to revenge-filled monster in a story that explores the loss of one’s identity and humanity, corrosive love, and the dark underbelly of scientific ambition.”
Same actor name. Same disfigurement. Same experimental procedure. Same Gotham City. Per Wikipedia’s entry on the character’s screen appearances, “the Matt Hagen incarnation of Clayface appears in the DC Universe franchise. Hagen is introduced in the first season of ‘Creature Commandos,’ voiced by Alan Tudyk. Tom Rhys Harries will portray Hagen in a self-titled film.” Same guy.
The Movie Is The Origin Story. “Creature Commandos” Is Where He Ends Up.
Once you accept they are the same Matt Hagen, the timeline does the work. The film is, by every available description, the moment the actor becomes the monster. Trauma, scientist, procedure, transformation. The Mike Flanagan script — which Flanagan himself has said takes inspiration from the 1992 “Batman: The Animated Series” two-parter “Feat of Clay” — has always been pitched as a tragedy first and a horror movie second.
“Creature Commandos” is what happens to that man years later, after the clay has won.
The character we meet on the show isn’t the actor anymore. The actor is gone. The clay is what’s left, and it has been wearing his memory of a personality for so long that it’s started to mimic him badly. He plays video games. He gets hungry. He performs being human at a class of college students like an alien who has only seen humans on television. The vanity, the craft, the artistic ego that defined Matt Hagen the man — those are gone, replaced by appetites and impulses. The body, technically, can still look like anything. The mind has stopped trying.
This is a very old horror move, and arguably the most Cronenbergian thing the DCU could possibly commit to. “The Fly” ends with Brundle pleading to be killed because he is no longer Brundle. “Annihilation” ends with the Lena who comes back not being the Lena who left. The thing about a body-horror premise is that it doesn’t end at the transformation. It ends at the long, slow erosion of what made the person a person in the first place. The “Creature Commandos” Clayface is the endpoint of the disease the movie is going to start.
The Tonal Whiplash Is The Point
The fan complaint — that the trailer looks like a serious horror movie and the show looks like an Adult Swim throwaway — isn’t wrong as a description. It is wrong as a criticism. James Gunn has been nakedly clear since taking over DC Studios that the studio’s whole pitch is no house style. As he told CBS in 2025 about “Clayface” specifically: it’s “a totally different thing. Although it’s in the same universe, it’s a complete horror film… we don’t want people to get bored. We want to invigorate people.”
This is the inverse of the late-period MCU problem, where every movie and Disney+ show eventually flattens into the same lighting, the same quip cadence, the same orchestral swell. Gunn is openly betting that audiences can hold a tragic R-rated body horror in one hand and a gross-out animated comedy in the other and understand they are connected by character, not by tone. The MCU’s “What If…?” tried something tonally similar but kept it firewalled in a multiverse. The DCU is doing it inside one continuity.
Tudyk himself has talked about the schism. He plays Clayface in the comedic “Harley Quinn” series as a dramatic idiot constantly asking about his motivation. He plays Clayface in “Creature Commandos” as, in his words, “a killer… a homicidal maniac.” Same character, his words, two completely different ways. The Harley Quinn version isn’t even canon to the DCU. The “Creature Commandos” version is. Tudyk was already operating on the principle that one Matt Hagen can contain multitudes — it just so happens that those multitudes are now also going to include a sad Welsh actor melting his face off in a Liverpool soundstage.
The Loose Thread: Who Voices Him Going Forward?
The one real complication is Gunn’s stated DCU rule that animated and live-action versions of a character should share a performer. Tudyk got to “Creature Commandos” first. Harries has the movie. Gunn has been more flexible about this than the original promise suggested — Tudyk also voices Doctor Phosphorus on the show despite no live-action commitment — but if Clayface ever shows up animated again in the DCU, there’s a real question whether Tudyk reprises or Harries takes over. Gamesradar reported that Tudyk was the assumed voice for “any future appearances.” The movie casting may have quietly rewritten that.
So How Do You Watch The Trailer Now
Treat it like the cold open of a long story you’re already in the middle of.
The man on screen, gripping a sink and pulling his own face into putty, is the human version of the gross thing playing video games on someone else’s couch. The movie is going to make you feel sorry for him. The show has already made you feel disgusted by him. Both are correct. The whole point of a body-horror character is that the line between sympathy and revulsion is exactly where the horror lives.
“Creature Commandos” didn’t break the DCU’s Clayface. It just spoiled his ending.
“Clayface” hits theaters October 23, 2026.
