Billy the Kid star Tom Blyth reveals friendship with Aussie Daniel Webber amid Hunger Games movie fever

Tom Blyth of Hunger Games fame reveals why he’d do another film, and how he became good mates with Aussie actor Daniel Webber as they live and film their own cowboy fantasy.

Daniel Webber and Tom Blythe in a scene from Billy The Kid on Stan.

Far from the romanticised vision of more than a century of Westerns, life in the American Old West was famously awful for most of the people who lived there.

Conditions were often either baking hot or freezing cold, work was hard, the food was terrible, personal hygiene was questionable and the threat of violence was never far away.

But for Hunger Games star Tom Blyth and Aussie actor Daniel Webber, filming Billy the Kid in the Canadian wilderness outside Calgary is their version of living the dream – even when the temperature around them is nudging -40C.

Not only is it a realisation of their childhood cowboy fantasies, but the tight-knit cast and crew are having about as much fun as actors can have on and off set as well.

“The dream is not lost on us right now,” agrees Webber via Zoom from the New South Wales Central Coast. “And in Canada if you like nature and you like the outdoors, it’s got that on such an epic scale. We are shooting just shy of the Rockies so we’d have mornings with mountain lions running across the road, and there’s moose and all sorts of critters.”

Daniel Webber and Tom Blythe in a scene from Billy The Kid on Stan.

British rising star Blyth, who drives the action as the title character, initially bonded with Webber over their mutual love of surfing, and was delighted to discover that the man who was playing his on-screen frenemy Jesse Evans was even more of an outdoor thrillseeker than he was. And when they are not drinking, doing karaoke or go-karting, they are skiing, surfing, rock-climbing and what Blyth calls “mental hiking”.

“Dan has gone from being just a hiker on Season 1 to now at the end of Season 2: Part 2, he’s doing ice climbing with ice picks and had to get rescued off a mountain face because he rescued someone else who fell down a crevasse,” says Blyth, Zooming into the call from London. “I don’t want to be doing that. I love a hike – but that’s just too much. I’m like, ‘we already do enough during the week – I just need some sleep’.”

Blythe in a scene from Billy The Kid.

After filming the first season of Billy the Kid three years ago, the second had to be split into two parts because of last year’s actors and writers strikes. Fortunately, the break came right in the middle and after the first four episodes of Season 2 dropped last year, Blyth’s star rose even further with the release of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, in which he played the younger version of future dictator Coriolanus Snow.

Coming back to film the second part of the series and literally getting back on the horse was the easy part, thanks to countless hours galloping on the plains and rustling cattle in previous episodes. Gun-slinging, as it turns out, not so much.

“Spinning the guns I definitely had to practice again because you lose the balance,” says Blyth. “It’s like playing guitar, like you lose the calluses when you don’t play.”

While artistic licence has been taken with the real-life characters of William H. Bonney – aka Billy the Kid – and the leader of the Jesse Evans Gang, the series is based on real events such as the Lincoln County War, a conflict between rival factions in New Mexico.

Daniel Webber and Tom Blythe in Billy The Kid.

The action resumes with former partners in crime Billy and Jesse on opposite sides, but although they have been pitted against each other and are willing to kill to achieve their aims, the brotherly bond between them remains complicated.

“I keep describing it two guys who played on the same football team for years and then ended up on opposite sides,” says Blyth. “Like, both played for Man United and then one ends up at Man City and then they have to face off in a derby. There’s a mutual respect and admiration for the other person, but also, just a bitter rivalry there too.”

Webber says that show creator Michael Hirst explained the dynamic to him as like the ugly feud that erupted between Paul McCartney and John Lennon after The Beatles broke up.

“It was this idea of these guys who have taken on the world – the biggest musicians in the world – and they have been through it all from 17 to 30 or whatever age where they ended up having their feud and having a split and just throwing bombs in the press at each other and in songs,” Webber says. “It was just this bitter backwards and forwards and neither of them really understanding why, but there is just so much friction and bad blood and history there that they can’t get past it.”

Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Picture: Murray Close

Daniel Webber in Seriously Red. Picture: Dean Podmore

Before he broke through as an actor with roles in The Dirt, in which he played Motley Crue singer Vince Neil and The Battle of Long Tan, Webber started his career as a stuntman and rode motorbikes in George Miller’s insane action scenes for Mad Max: Fury Road. Between the seasons of Billy the Kid, he used the down time to further his side career, training for ten months and getting his accreditation just in time to appear in Mad Max: Furiosa.

“This one was about a week and a half of being in a car driving through the desert with other cars coming and camera trucks getting soooo close, like millimetres away and you’re doing crazy speeds,” he says. “Then Tom and I just got our bike licences and the next minute I’m with 60 dudes racing behind these 1200 Harleys with skulls on them. And you have zero protection. Nothing. It is everything you expect it to be. It’s wild but it’s a lot of fun.”

As for another Hunger Games film, after Songbirds and Snakes collected a tidy $506 million at the box office, Blyth says he’s game, but it’s all up to the author of the books.

It was announced this week that Suzanne Collins is writing another prequel film, set 40 years after Songbirds and Snakes and 24 years before the original Hunger Games trilogy that starrred Jennifer Lawrence. That would make the character of Snow 58 years old for that action that would centre around the 50th Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell in which Haymitch Abernathy, portrayed by Woody Harrelson in the original series, competed. That might be stretch for the 29-year-old Blyth, but with digital technology and make-up, anything is possible. Regardless, he’s keen for more.

“I’d love to do another one,” he says. “There’s a lot more to tell about Snow and his cousin Tigris and I just feel like there is so much about that world that is so rich and eligible to be delved into more.”

Daniel Webber and Tom Blythe in Billy The Kid.

In the meantime, the two mates hope there is more of the Billy and Jesse saga to be told with a third season (“that’s above my pay grade,” says Blyth) and plenty more waves to be surfed. And after the frigid waters off Canada’s Victoria Island, where the pair took a trip together after the first season wrapped, and Blyth’s local break in Queens, New York, Webber has a few local spots on the Central Coast he’d like to show his co-star.

“Hell yeah, man, there is a spot,” he says with a smile. “We have warmed up the surf for him, it’s ready to go.”

Billy the Kid is now streaming on Stan, available through Hubbl.

Originally published as Billy the Kid star Tom Blyth reveals friendship with Aussie Daniel Webber amid Hunger Games movie fever