deadline recently reported that the great Batman villain Clayface will play a role The Batman – Part II. Approaching with caution, they advise that these are all just rumors, but write: “That said, other sources tell us that scripts are constantly changing and that Clayface is a great addition to Matt Reeves’ The Batman 2. Let’s wait until the dust settles here and something is moving forward.”
With such a rich catalog of enemies to choose from, and as a previously unseen villain on the big screen, this is very exciting news if true. But who is Clayface anyway? Here’s what you need to know about the character.
A (clay) face that only a mother can love
For a monster physically made of clay and so resistant to staying solid, it’s fitting that Clayface’s history is murky and hard to pin down. There have actually been several Clayfaces throughout Batman’s publishing and television history, all from different backgrounds. Youtube Channel The new waywhich focuses entirely on biographies of cartoon characters and their origins, quotes no less than nine different versions of Clayface.
Created before other classic Batman villains in Penguin, Two-Face and Mr. Freeze, DC Comics has directly given us eight iterations of Clayface since Basil Karlo’s original in 1940. This version was completely impotent and used by a B-list actor, donning the costume from a previous movie to kill those who would succeed in a remake of one of his previous films (he would later return with powers).
The Clayfaces that would follow would be created through many more comic books: with barrels of acid, science, and other various ways to create this horrible criminal for Batman to then fight, imprison, and even team up with.
Clayface in animation
In perhaps the most popular iteration, voiced by none other than Ron Perlman, Batman: The Animated Series saw semi-successful actor Matt Hagen previously disfigured in a terrible accident and now addicted to a miraculous face cream. But he used it so much that Hagen can now change his image into something or someone.
This “Clayface” creature, which evolved into a monstrous man of brown clay with cartoonishly misshapen teeth, could not only embody anyone he wanted, but also recreate them as the fantastic actor Hagen is, in addition to hands that are now capable of to transform into deadly weapons (just like Valve 2the T1000).
With the series’ stylistic setting and gothic themes, Clayface plays with the story of Jekyll and Hyde as Hagen forces the cream to a dangerous level, transforming into a monstrous brown putty with eyes and a mouth. As a fantastic actor on top of his new skill, he would take the form of Bruce Wayne himself, framing the playboy while fighting Batman at the same time. Over the course of the two-part episode titled “Feat of Clay,” this monster is not finally defeated until it is reminded of the man he used to fake his own death for the hooded crusader.
More recently, the character has appeared in the live-action Gotham series and returns to animation once again as a regular in the much-better-than-it-has-a-right-to-be Harley Quinn series. Following the overall theme, this Clayface is also a desperate actor jumping for any role he can get, who would later accidentally kill Billy Bob Thornton and impersonate the performer.
The show must go on
There is a theme through the iterationshowever, one that binds their loose forms together as one; a sense of tragic loneliness. Karlo’s original was a working actor who had appropriated himself in his hard work (and is strangely prescient given the huge proliferation of remakes since the turn of the century).
The third Clayface Preston Payne features a formerly abused man who messes with science and is locked in a special suit forever in order to survive. The fourth Clayface, Sondra Fuller, hates how she looks and agrees to become Clayface to change that completely.
Guess this
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2022 The batter saw the Riddler as Gotham City’s main villain. With a new Batman in Robert Pattinson, we got a new look at the city and its inhabitants. This saw Riddler (Paul Dano) at his most stripped down compared to the louder iterations that had come before in Frank Gorshin and Jim Carrey respectively. If you believe Clayface will star in this sequel, a refreshingly bizarre new villain will be brought to the screen in the very serious world of Batman.
How and where Clayface fits into this semi-realistic world is the real mystery, even if he even appears, as we are led to believe on the basis of this half-rumor. We personally love the sequel the adopts Animated seriesmain plot points and seeing an actor impersonate Wayne and cause mayhem that way, albeit without the super powers. We’ve been shown multiple times that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed leaving a theater, and that Clayface is an actor by origin, so maybe those two stories are being combined to make it personal for Wayne.
The Batman – Part II is still a long way off, with a 2025 release as the news and rumors get more *ahem* solid, so we’ll keep you posted.