When 28-year-old Tom Blyth, a Juilliard graduate best known for the MGM+ series Billy the Kid and an appearance on HBO’s The Gilded Age, learned that he would be leading the next Hunger Games film, he panicked. “I definitely went into this thinking, This massive machine is gonna consume me—eat me up and spit me out,” he tells me on the latest episode of Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast. “The fans are gonna hate me online, [they’re] not going to think I’m the right person for the job, and Francis [Lawrence] won’t be accessible as a director because he’ll be too busy.”
Blyth had reason to let a few negative thoughts prevail. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel set about 60 years before Suzanne Collins’s original trilogy, is built on risk. Its main character is a boyhood version of Donald Sutherland’s towering President Snow, the franchise’s eventual villain. And by playing him, Blyth would be stepping into the leading role space last occupied by the arrow-slinging Katniss Everdeen, brought to life by Jennifer Lawrence mere months before she won an Academy Award.
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But the odds turned out to be ever in Blyth’s favor—thanks, in part, to a movie that manages to launch a fresh class of characters into the rich landscape that many other YA-targeted dystopian films have failed to emulate. “It felt like making a beautiful indie movie together that just happens to already have a built-in fanbase, which is kind of like a dream as a filmmaker because there’s a hunger for it already,” says Blyth, “Pardon the pun.”
On this week’s Little Gold Men, Blyth reflects on the franchise’s past, future and what it’s grappling with in Snow’s present: “You see everything that he could be if he took the honorable path. You get to see his potential. And the audience gets to fall in love with the potential and then be devastated when he may or may not live up to that potential as a human being. Hopefully, even though [the audience] know where he’s going to end up, they can spend two-plus-hours rooting for him to do the right thing. It was mostly an exercise in forgetting where he’s going up to end up and just being with him in the now.” Listen below, and read a partial transcript of the conversation.
Vanity Fair: It felt so cool to see this film in theaters because we’re in a similar age bracket and kind of grew up with The Hunger Games at the height of its popularity. What was your relationship with the originals—were you dressing up for midnight screenings or more removed from it?
Tom Blyth: I didn’t ever dress up for this one. I used to go to Star Wars screenings and stuff dressed up—Harry Potter. But I was a big fan of the movies and I did go and see them every time they came out. Me and my mom used to take my younger sister to go and see them. So this was a pretty full circle moment, like having my family in the audience the other day at the world premiere in London. Francis handed me a mic to deliver the speech to welcome people to the screening. I looked up and saw my mom and sister in the back row and getting to bring it specifically to them was a pretty cool moment.
When you learn of the prequel and audition for this role, do you go back and revisit the films?
It’s funny, it’s kind of like a catch-22 because you want to get immersed back into the universe and storytelling language that is in the original films. But at the same time, because I’m one of the few characters in this movie that is also in the other movies, you want to be careful not to copy or try and recreate everything. Donald Sutherland is so good and specific and memorable in those original films.
Francis Lawrence and I both felt this risk or this trap that we could fall into trying to recreate some sort of Donald Sutherland impersonation. So very early on, we talked about specifically not doing that and playing this kid as a kid—someone who is 64 years younger and very different from where he ends up in the original films. The film is basically split up into three chapters and each chapter is a significant moment where he transitions from boy to man and then man to future president. The last chapter, when we started filming those scenes, I did go back and start looking at some of Donald’s scenes in the original films and also some from films when he was younger just to filter a little bit more of that into the performance. To bring Coryo one step closer to the older version that he’s about to become.
Some actors say that when you play a villainous character, you don’t approach the person as a villain. You have to justify their decisions and not side against the character you’re playing. But in this film, we see Coriolanus Snow shift into the villain we’ll see in later films. Is there an exact moment you felt that shift the most?
