Playing Pinhead took physical, emotional toll on new ‘Hellraiser’ star

Pinhead the iconic ‘80s horror-movie villain is a gruesome ghoul all about the pleasure of pain. Pinhead the Twitter emoji is just sinfully adorable.

The director of the new “Hellraiser” (now streaming on Hulu) was the first to tell star Jamie Clayton — the newest Hell Priest — about her cartoon counterpart on Twitter. “I was like, ‘What?!’ ” says Clayton, who then informed her followers about the little figure conjured by using the hashtag #Hellraiser: “Listen up. If you do this, it is the cutest thing ever. Ever.”

Clayton’s Pinhead is way more terrifying. A trans actress best known for her role in Netflix’s “Sense8,” she seizes her spooky side to take on a new version of the twisted being. (Doug Bradley played Pinhead in eight “Hellraiser” movies, including Clive Barker’s 1987 original film.) Director David Bruckner’s reimagining centers on a struggling addict (Odessa A’zion) who comes into possession of an ancient puzzle box and summons the sadistic Cenobites and their eerily serene, torturing queen Priest.

“I was very intimidated to step into this role but also up for the challenge,” says Clayton, 44, who found Pinhead to be an enormously taxing role, physically and emotionally. She weathered “incredibly hot and restricting” prosthetics and also mined the “well of my life and all of the good and the bad things that I’ve been through, putting that all into a pot and casting a spell and hoping that it worked.”

Raised in San Diego, Clayton was “a total scaredy-cat” who avoided horror in her younger years, so she’d never seen the original “Hellraiser” until the night before she taped her audition. “I had no idea how sexy it was,” says Clayton, who researched Barker, his novella “The Hellbound Heart“ (the basis for “Hellraiser”) “and how he wrote that from his experiences going to BDSM clubs in New York.”

From the start, Bruckner wanted to cast a woman as the new Pinhead, and when he watched Clayton’s first read, “she just scared the hell out of me,” says the filmmaker, who directed 2020’s “The Night House.” Once filming started and Clayton would arrive on the Serbian “Hellraiser” set, “you would often feel a hush fall over the crew and you knew you were in the presence of royalty. It can be quite intimidating to work with Jamie when she’s in full Pinhead design.”

Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

The horror genre is rife with final girls but not many memorable female villains, and Clayton says it feels “so special” to inhabit the next incarnation of a scary-movie legend like Pinhead.

Being trans, “there’s just this idea that I’m not allowed to play certain things or that I can’t play certain things,” Clayton says. “Hellraiser” was “just one of those beautiful moments [with] something I never thought I’d be allowed to do, but they opened the door and they allowed me in, and I was able to do what I do. And it was good,” she adds with a laugh.

“It means the world to me just to be given the opportunity because it’s like, yeah, look, I can do this. Next, I’ll play like a lawyer in space. I don’t know but I can do it all!”