'Clayface' Writer Mike Flanagan Says a 1992 Batman Cartoon Inspired It

The two-part 'Feat of Clay,' with Ron Perlman voicing actor Matt Hagen, is the story Flanagan said shaped his script.

Long before Tom Rhys Harries started melting as Matt Hagen in the new "Clayface," Ron Perlman voiced the same doomed movie star in a two-part Batman cartoon. The movie's writer, Mike Flanagan, says that cartoon is where his script came from.

When TVLine put together five shows to watch after the movie on Friday, the day it opened, it ended the list with "Batman: The Animated Series" and its two-parter "Feat of Clay." Flanagan had already said as much. "That two-parter knocked me out," he told ComicBook.com in May 2025. "That is the world I wanted to live in."

Put the two stories side by side and the bones match. In the cartoon, which ComicBook.com says aired as the fourth and fifth episodes of Season 1, Hagen is an actor scarred in a car crash and hooked on a face-fixing goo called Renuyu. His supplier is a gangster, Roland Daggett (Ed Asner), whose men try to kill him with an overdose that turns him into Clayface instead. In the film, TVLine reports, a Gotham mobster played by David Dencik wrecks Hagen's face for sleeping with the mobster's girlfriend, and the cure is an experimental serum from a scientist played by Naomi Ackie.

The monster doesn't stop at the credits. DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran told Entertainment Weekly that it's the same Clayface who turns up in HBO Max's animated "Creature Commandos," and that the movie's events come first, GamesRadar reported in July. In that show's fifth episode, he's caught posing as Dr. Aisla MacPherson in her own apartment. TVLine notes that nobody has explained yet how the movie's Hagen ends up there.

Flanagan had already handed the movie off. "I'm not directing it," he told ComicBook.com, which noted that James Watkins was directing and Hossein Amini was rewriting the script. "I really hope it remains true to the spirit of what I wanted it to be," he said. "But it's not my movie, so I'll be in the audience with you."

Source: tvline.com, retrieved October 24, 2026. Other sources: comicbook.com, yahoo.com.