Jamie Clayton (born 1978) is the American actress who played the Priest, Pinhead, in Hellraiser (2022), and Nomi Marks in Sense8.
Quick Specs
| Born | January 15, 1978, San Diego, California |
| First career | makeup artist, in New York from age 19 |
| Horror | the Priest, the Lead Cenobite known as Pinhead, in Hellraiser (2022); the Casting Director in The Neon Demon (2016) |
| Breakthrough | Nomi Marks in Sense8 (2015 to 2018) |
| Also | Tess Van De Berg in The L Word: Generation Q (2019 to 2023); Sasha Booker in Designated Survivor (2019) |
| Distinction | the first woman to play Pinhead in the Hellraiser films |
Who She Is
Jamie Clayton was born in San Diego on January 15, 1978, and grew up there. Her father, Howard Clayton, is a criminal defence attorney, and her mother, Shelley, an event planner. She is a transgender woman, a public fact central to the documented significance of her two defining roles.
Acting came late. At 19 she moved to New York City to become a makeup artist, and that was the career television found first. In 2010, at 32, she was the makeup artist and co-host of VH1’s TRANSform Me, alongside Laverne Cox and Nina Poon. She did not begin acting until her thirties, and she was leading a Netflix series within five years. She also works as a model. Her standard for all of it is her own line: “I want to be judged for my work, not for what I’ve been through.”
The Work, and What She Did in It
Her first acting break was Kyla in the third and final season of HBO’s Hung (2011), opposite Thomas Jane, at 33, with no acting credits behind her. In 2012 she led Dirty Work, an Emmy-winning interactive web series, as Michelle, a crime-scene cleanup operative, opposite Mary Lynn Rajskub and Hank Harris. Credits in Are We There Yet? (2012) and Hustling (2013) followed, along with audiobook narration of the children’s novel Melissa, about a young transgender girl.
Sense8 (2015 to 2018) was the breakthrough. Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski created the series, and Clayton was one of its eight “sensate” leads across two seasons and the feature-length finale, Sense8: Amor Vincit Omnia (June 8, 2018). She was 37 at the June 5, 2015 premiere. Nomi Marks is a trans woman, a political blogger and hacker in San Francisco, in a relationship with Amanita Caplan (Freema Agyeman). Clayton’s main reason for wanting the part was the chance to play a trans character written by trans creators, and she was a science-fiction and Straczynski fan besides. As she tells it, Lana Wachowski wanted “a woman who was trans, who had acting experience… some honesty and some authenticity.” She played Nomi as a life, not a transition plot. Nomi’s story, she said, did not revolve around transition; she was “a whole, complete person… thrust into this amazing cluster,” and her hacking repeatedly got the cluster out of trouble. She carried the family-rejection storyline, the hospital scenes with a mother who loves her only “on my terms,” which Clayton singled out as the material that would teach audiences new to trans lives. Both Wachowskis are trans women, and Lilly came out publicly in 2016, during the run.
Her feature debut was small and pointed. In Nicolas Winding Refn’s fashion-horror film The Neon Demon (2016) she plays the Casting Director, one of the gatekeepers in Jesse’s (Elle Fanning) descent through a modelling world the film depicts as vampiric. It is a small appearance, not a co-lead. She was 37 when she filmed it in 2015 and 38 at its 2016 release, and the former makeup artist’s first film role was a judge of beauty. Around it came Motive (2016), a voice in BoJack Horseman (2016), Jien Garson in the game Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), Edda in Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman (2017), and Dr Ryan in The Chain.
The established run followed. In season 3 of Designated Survivor (2019) she played Sasha Booker, the president’s sister-in-law, bringing a trans character into a mainstream political drama as family rather than as a guest-issue storyline. In The L Word: Generation Q (2019 to 2023) she starred for three seasons and 16 episodes as Tess Van De Berg, the bartender at the centre of the show’s queer Los Angeles, an original character in a legacy sequel. She was 41 when both arrived. In season 2 of Roswell, New Mexico (2020) she played Agent Grace Powell, an FBI agent revealed as Charlie Cameron, a series regular’s sister. She appeared as herself in the documentary Disclosure (2020), played Christine Jorgensen in the docuseries Equal (2020), and voiced the Seid-Kona in Twilight of the Gods (2024).
Hellraiser (2022) is her horror centrepiece. David Bruckner directed it from a screenplay by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, from a story by Collins, Piotrowski and David S. Goyer. It is a reboot and the franchise’s eleventh film, a fresh adaptation of Clive Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart rather than a remake of the 1987 film’s plot. “This is not a remake,” Bruckner said. “This is a new story in the Hellraiser universe.” Riley McKendry (Odessa A’zion), a young woman struggling with addiction, comes into possession of the puzzle box, the Lament Configuration, and draws the Cenobites down on herself and her circle, against the designs of Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić).
Clayton is credited as the Priest: the Lead Cenobite known to the world as Pinhead. Spyglass and Hulu announced her casting on October 7, 2021, with production already wrapped after a September to October shoot in Serbia. It made her the first woman to play Pinhead in the films, and the first trans performer in the role. Bruckner said she “fully embodies the role as the Hell Priest.” Barker returned as a producer, alongside Marc Toberoff, and blessed the film: “Having seen some of the designs from David Bruckner’s new Hellraiser film, they pay homage to what the first film created, but then take it to places it’s never been before… David and his team are steeped in the story’s mythology.”
The role has a lineage. Doug Bradley originated the Lead Cenobite in Barker’s 1987 film and played him in eight films, through Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005). Stephan Smith Collins took the role in Revelations (2011) and Paul T. Taylor in Judgment (2018), before Clayton. She did not take over directly from Bradley. She refused the imitation brief by design. “We didn’t want to do a Doug Bradley impression; we just didn’t think that’s possible to do,” Bruckner said, and he promised audiences “a sense of what Pinhead’s desires might be in a way that hits a little different.”
What she built is a theologian of experience rather than a slasher: still, curious and desiring, a Priest who interrogates, offers and adjudicates the box’s configurations. Through extensive prosthetics, and with her voice electronically altered, the performance lives in voice and posture. Where Bradley’s Pinhead was deep, sepulchral and theatrical, hers is processed, whispering and close. She leads a redesigned court: the Chatterer (Jason Liles), the Weeper (Yinka Olorunnife), the Gasp (Selina Lo), the Asphyx (Zachary Hing), the Mother and the Masque. She was 44 at release. The film had its world premiere as the secret screening at Fantastic Fest on September 28, 2022, screened at Beyond Fest on October 4, and was released on Hulu in the United States on October 7, 2022. Reviews of the film were mixed, and they consistently singled out Clayton. The reboot’s most praised element is its Priest.
Cool Verified Facts
- Her credit is the Priest; the character is the Lead Cenobite the world calls Pinhead. The 1987 film credited Bradley as “Lead Cenobite.”
- Barker’s novella describes the pin-headed Cenobite this way: “Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy — the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone.”
- She is the fourth actor to play the Lead Cenobite on screen, after Doug Bradley, Stephan Smith Collins and Paul T. Taylor.
- Her screen debut was in her first profession, as a makeup artist on television.
- Before Sense8 she narrated the audiobook of Melissa, a children’s novel about a young transgender girl.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
The casting was a choice and an audition. Bruckner said: “We felt a kind of anticipation around the fans to reimagine the character. We knew we wanted Pinhead to be a woman. Jamie was just the right person for the role. A person’s identity can be really exciting for a role in many ways, but I have to emphasize that Jamie absolutely killed, that’s how we got there.” The direction came from the text: the novella, Bruckner said, “was suggestive of a female Pinhead, and the comic books also explored the idea,” and it “spoke of a pinheaded Cenobite in a way that was rather androgynous, but also female.” Barker’s Cenobites in the novella are androgynous, their genders hard to read. The book describes a voice and an androgyny, not a casting instruction.
Barker was inside the production, not a logo. Bruckner called him “a creative producer, and very generous with his time,” giving notes on script and edit, and quoted his advice: “You have to do your own thing, you can’t try to imitate this beat for beat.”
The design broke with the leather. The 2022 Cenobites abandon black-leather fetish wear for bodies of their own flayed, re-fashioned skin. The lead concept designer, Keith Thompson, Bruckner’s collaborator since The Ritual, had the idea: what if they were “their own leather.” Josh and Sierra Russell of Russell FX built the silicone suits. Kathrin Eder was the production designer, but the creatures were not her work.
Why She Matters
For horror, Jamie Clayton re-founded an icon. Pinhead had been defined by one performance, Bradley’s, across eight films, and then diminished by two successors in declining sequels. Clayton’s Priest, the first woman in the role, built on a documented return to Barker’s text and singled out on release, gave the franchise a second definitive interpretation rather than an impersonation, and gave the reboot its centre of gravity.
She is also a documented hinge in trans representation. Sense8 centred a trans character written by trans creators and played by a trans actor, in a story not about transition. Designated Survivor carried her into mainstream political drama, and Hellraiser into an iconic horror lead. And the chronology is part of the meaning: a makeup artist at 19, a television co-host at 32, a first acting role at 33, a series lead at 37 and a horror icon at 44. She built the whole career in adulthood, across three professions.