‘Hunger Games’ Antihero Tom Blyth on Entering His ‘Hubba Hubba’ Moment

Courtesy of Eric Ray Davidson

Tom Blyth, the 28-year-old British actor who stars in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, arrives at the Hotel Chelsea's new restaurant Cafe Chelsea for our interview wearing a Leonard Cohen t-shirt. He thought it would be appropriate for the setting. After all, Cohen wrote "Chelsea Hotel #2" and the hotel was a legendary bohemian haunt, but gone are the days when Patti Smith roamed these halls. Everything's pristinely chic now, and we can order matcha lattes and green juices as we talk about Blyth's ascendancy into Hollywood with the prequel to the beloved YA franchise.

But, as I'll also learn, the shirt fits perfectly with Blyth's personality. Despite being a lad from the Midlands, he's enchanted by American aesthetics. (Yes, I'm aware that Leonard Cohen is from Canada, but he does represent a New York of yore.) "I think more and more I'm realizing I'm just obsessed with Americana," Blyth says.

He applied to Julliard after watching Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis and Adam Driver in Girls—frustrated by what he perceived as a classism toward Northerners in British acting—and despite having never been to the U.S. before his audition for the prestigious school, leapt headfirst into his new life. "I've always liked stepping out into the unknown, stepping into the abyss," he says. "I think that's kind of the reason I like acting as well, because it feels like you're always like mentally or psychologically stepping into the abyss a little bit to see what happens. And it feels risky in an interesting way."

Now he's in a different kind of unknown territory: A press tour for a major blockbuster. A press tour that he wasn't even sure was necessarily going to happen. But Lionsgate's film, directed by Francis Lawrence, got an interim agreement right before the SAG strike ended, and Blyth learned that if he took off his jacket on a red carpet he would hear a photographer go, "This is a hubba hubba moment."

In addition to learning what a media frenzy looks like, Blyth has also received praise for his work in the prequel to the movies that made a global superstar of Jennifer Lawrence. Blyth plays Coriolanus Snow, a role played by Donald Sutherland in the originals. Here, however, the future evil president of Panem is a young, striving upstart who starts to fall for Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), the entrancing girl he is supposed to mentor in the vicious Hunger Games, where children fight to the death. Reviewing the film for Indiewire, David Ehrlich wrote, "It’s a testament to the unmoored scariness of Blyth’s performance that Coriolanus’ final descent into madness allows for so many possible explanations."

Blyth, whose prior film work included the late Terence Davies' Benediction, never expected he would be promoting a movie like this. "I've started to hate hearing the word 'franchise' come out of my mouth," he says. "Because I never thought that it was going to be something that I would say because I always wanted to do like 'proper films.'" He adds, "That would be in quotation marks in the piece, and 'proper' would be spelled P-R-O-P-A, like in a British accent."

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, however, felt different to him than the machine he was trying to avoid. He loved the previous films, and when he read the novel while auditioning he thought, "These books are really really good and they are about something more than just, like, superhero powers." He was drawn to the "really kind of fucked up love story" aspect as well.

Playing “Coryo,” as the character is called, also gave Blyth a chance to undergo a physical transformation, a challenge he loves. On the MGM+ series Billy the Kid, where he plays the title role, he tries to do as much of his stunt horseback riding as possible. Here, he lost weight to portray Coryo at his most destitute in the beginning of the film. "We had to really carefully map out when I could afford to change into slightly beefier Coryo," he says.

Although Snow is certainly his breakout role, this was not Blyth's first time on a major film set. In fact, he appeared as "feral child" in Ridley Scott's 2010 Robin Hood, when he was a young teen while performing with Nottingham's Television Workshop, a program that counts Samantha Morton and Bella Ramsey as alums. And yet he still went into Ballad thinking that his co-stars—Zegler, who was the star of Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, and Hunter Schafer, one of the breakouts from Euphoria—were way ahead of him in their careers. It took him a beat to realize he has his own form of experience. "I have like an embarrassingly long CV of like really tiny little parts and things," he says.

Not that he didn't learn from Zegler and Schafer. The former could tell him what it's like to be a focal point on an enormous set; the latter, also a model, shared information about the world of fashion, a universe he's become more interested in over the past two years. "She was like, ‘These people are way more down to Earth than you think they are,’" he remembers.

Blyth has been working with stylist Michael Fisher to cultivate his own look—his inspirations tend to lean old school like Alain Delon and Cary Grant. He likes slouchy suits, which is the aesthetic he was going for with the black Valentino ensemble he wore to the Los Angeles premiere. And then he took the oversized jacket off, baring his arms. Zegler spent the next day sending him "thirst trap" posts.

We meet on a Friday afternoon as Blyth is on his way back home to Williamsburg. His big plans for the weekend are to sleep in the following morning. He doesn't have much time for relaxation until he has to brave the Calgary winter and shoot the part of the second season of Billy the Kid that was put on hold for the strike.

Beyond that he's already in high demand. For the first time in his life, his next year looks sorted. He can't really say what's in the pipeline, but the one he's most jazzed about is an adaptation of a "very famous" American novel that shoots in Northern Italy, describing it as "book that I read as a lover of this writer and I'm incredibly excited to bring to film," he says, without giving any more clues.

Even with the mystery, it's clear this British boy is living out his American dream.

Originally Appeared on GQ