‘Hunger Games’ Actor Tom Blyth to Star in Michael Winterbottom’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ Adaptation

Scott Roxborough
·3 min read

Tom Blyth is exchanging the Hunger Games for a hospital bed. The British actor, who plays a young Coriolanus Snow in Francis Lawrence’s Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, has signed on to play the lead role in Michael Winterbottom’s new adaptation of the Ernst Hemingway WWI classic A Farewell to Arms.

Blyth will play Frederic Henry, a volunteer ambulance driver who is injured in Italy during the first World War and falls in love with his nurse.

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The Hemingway novel, first published in 1929 and closely based on the writer’s own experience as a volunteer ambulance driver with the Italian Army on the Isonzo Front, A Farewell to Arms has been adapted multiple times in the past, including in 1932 with Gary Cooper in the Frederic Henry role, in 1957 starring Rock Hudson, and as a 1966 mini-series with George Hamilton as Henry.

Winterbottom’s feature version is set to begin principal photography in Italy later next year. Winterbottom’s Revolution Films will produce together with Fremantle-owned Passenger. Melissa Parmenter will produce for Revolution, with Winterbottom and Passenger’s Richard Brown as executive producers. The film is being made with support from Hemingway’s Estate, in a deal brokered by Fremantle’s Raffaella De Angelis.

“Hemingway believed in paring a story down to the bare bones. He argued that a novel could be like an iceberg: The reader only sees the tip above the water but feels the bulk and weight of what lies below the surface,” said Winterbottom in a statement. “I want our film to be true to Hemingway’s approach — immediate, raw and natural — and I think in Tom Blyth, we have found the perfect person to be Frederic Henry.”

Blyth called Farewell to Arms “a dream project,” praising Winterbottom’s adaptation of Hemingway’s novel as capturing “all of the author’s unique nuance and precision. The examination of the human cost of conflict, and of love and hope trying to thrive within it, resonates more than ever.”

Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a prequel to the original post-apocalyptic trilogy, which co-stars Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis, has earned around $250 million at the worldwide box office.

Winterbottom is best known for such features as 24 Hour Party People, In This World, The Road to Guantanamo and the TV comedy travel franchise The Trip.

Fremantle, which has an exclusive first-look deal with Winterbottom’s Revolution Films, recently partnered with Brown and Winterbottom on the 2022 Sky Original drama This England, starring Kenneth Branagh as former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Fremantle acquired Passenger in December last year, part of the group’s global expansion into drama production.

Blyth is represented by Gersh, United Agents in the UK, MJ Management and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern. The novel A Farewell to Arms and the Estate of Ernest Hemingway are represented by Gersh.

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