Hero? Villain? Monster? Why DC’s latest leading man keeps us guessing

“Something that felt really palpable to me on the first read of this feature was that Matt’s face is circumstantially important for what he has chosen as a profession, and the vanity of it doesn’t interest me at all,” Harries says. “It’s [more] like if a violinist lost his ability to use his hands. Or a film reviewer not [be] able to watch a film for whatever reason.

“Separate to that, there’s an interesting by-product of being an actor potentially; that you then are commodified. And I don’t think it’s something that many actors that I know have a really complicated relationship with. Because it is just that. It’s a by-product of doing what my job is.

“I don’t really know how I feel about it, to be completely honest,” adds Harries. “I have this sort of detachment to it. But I know that I love being able to collaboratively tell stories with people that I really believe in.”

In terms of building an origin story, Flanagan drew his inspiration from a two-part story from Batman: The Animated Series, titled Feat of Clay. The double episode introduced Matt Hagen’s Clayface, on television voiced by actor Ron Perlman, recasting him (slightly) as a washed-up actor dependent on a dangerous chemical to keep his face working.

And notably, that television story opens with the image of the iconic masks of theatre that represent comedy and tragedy: Thalia, the Greek muse of comedy and pastoral poetry, represented by the laughing mask, and Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, represented by the weeping mask.

The result is a curious contradiction: a character sprung from the superhero canon, with the footnote that he is, in essence, a super villain. But here, he has been reshaped by Flanagan, an accomplished director of horror television and cinema. Which leaves all of it in an uncertain and compelling space.