Published by Quendrith Johnson

Oct 25, 2026

Quendrith Johnson is filmfestivals.com Los Angeles Correspondent covering everything happening in film in Hollywood... Well, the most interesting things, anyway. audiobook https://open.spotify.com/show/1FOmBR77pPEvuy1ro4aSNy?si=f4a52d6191c14b5bfind me @Quendrith on most social platforms :)@Quendrith I Facebook I screenmancer.tv

Clayface, How it Ranks in Top 10 Star Face-Mash Movies?

by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

Hollywood dubs them "bankable," "unforgettable," " faces, then occasionally takes a blade, a blowtorch or a bucket of latex to the merchandise. With Warner Bros.’ Clayface now in theaters, Tom Rhys Harries joins a fraternity of leading men wounded in the moneymaker.

Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Ralph Fiennes and others have surrendered their award-winning visages to scar stories that unpack identity, narcissistic vanity, cold violence and all-out ego effacement. Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it falls flat on its… yeah, face.

Here’s looking at you, DIGGER.

Tom Cruise qualifies twice: once with actual screen scars, once with Digger’s disappearing movie-star act.
Here are 10 star-driven pictures in which saving face becomes considerably more than an expression.

Besides giving you a reason to see DIGGER and boost its paltry box-office haul, these face-mash movies arrive just in time for Halloween. Mask season is the perfect time to reflect on all those close-ups—and the changing face of Hollywood itself, now that CLAYFACE’s Warner Bros. shares the Skydance banner with Paramount. Even the studios are swapping identities. The stars, at least, get to take their prosthetics off.

BONUS: Face/Off (1997) — Nicolas Cage and John Travolta
Why merely scar the moneymaker when you can repossess it? John Woo’s surgical identity swap sends FBI agent Sean Archer and terrorist Castor Troy into battle wearing each other’s faces. Cage and Travolta exchange the merchandise, then perform the personality underneath—a two-for-one special in Hollywood’s identity department. Some say John Frankenheimer did this gag best in Seconds from 1966?