Hunger Games star Tom Blyth revealed how Aussie Oscar-winners helped kickstart his career
Hunger Games prequel star Tom Blyth, who had humble beginnings as an actor, has revealed how the Aussie Oscar-winners helped kickstart his career. See the exclusive video.
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It’s been a long journey for Tom Blyth from bit player in a Hollywood blockbuster to headlining his own and he has a couple of Aussie Oscar-winners to thank for helping show him the way.
The British actor – currently playing the lead role in the Hunger Games prequel The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes – made his film debut at the age of 14 in Ridley Scott’s 2010 take on Robin Hood. His role is listed on the International Movie Database, along with several others, as “Feral Child”.
“I played Feral Child No.3 in that movie,” Blyth clarifies with a laugh on a Zoom call, alongside his Hunger Games co-star, Rachel Zegler, who interjects: “Not to be mistaken with Feral Child No.2.”
“It definitely wasn’t No.1,” decides Blyth.
As a glorified extra, Blyth unsurprisingly didn’t have any interaction with the historical epic’s leads, with Russell Crowe in the title role and Cate Blanchett as Marion, but just being on Scott’s enormous set and seeing the actors he had long admired in the flesh gave him a sense of possibility he applied to his fledgling career.
“I could see these amazing actors I had grown up watching on TV,” he says.
“Gladiator is one of my favourite films of all time. Even if I was too young to experience craft or whatever you want to call it or absorb from them, I think just being there and being inside it all felt like the gates opening a little bit.
“And being able to peer inside and go ‘whoa – that’s how people do it’ and see that it’s a real thing that people do. I’d love to meet them some day and remind them of that.”
Blyth’s career has been on a steadily upwards trajectory ever since, but the last year has taken him to another level entirely. He’s currently on screens in the second season of Western drama Billy the Kid, playing the titular outlaw born William H. Bonney.
And he’s also front and centre in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (BOSS) as the younger version of Donald Sutherland’s villainous Coriolanus Snow, who was the main antagonist of Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in the four hit Hunger Games films, released between 2012 and 2015.
BOSS, which is adapted from Suzanne Collins’ 2020 novel of the same name, is set 64 years before the events of Lawrence’s first film. It tells the story of the early days of the Hunger Games, in which children from different districts of post-apocalyptic North America – now named Panem – are pitted against each other in a fight to the death for the entertainment of the masses.
While Blyth was a huge fan of the earlier films, he’d never read the books and even after he’d signed on for BOSS, steered clear of them because he didn’t want to “infect my playing of the younger Coriolanus”. Sutherland’s performance as the oily, scheming, poison-loving dictator of Panem, however, had already made an impression on the young Blyth.
“As a teenager, when I first saw them, I was blown away and always found him so wry and mysterious,” says Blyth. “You love to hate him because he is so delicious and the way he delivers the lines is so sumptuous. But I had to forget some of that to make him my own in this. It’s set 64 years before the original so if you get there too soon then there’s no reason to go and watch this film.”
Blyth says that he had long discussions with Francis Lawrence, who directed the second, third and fourth Hunger Games films and returned for BOSS, about how Snow could transition from a sympathetic character full of promise and potential into the ruthless, murderous autocrat that audiences would love to hate.
“That’s fascinating as an actor, but also as a fan of the franchise, getting to go back and see what it is that undoes him as a person and a moral character,” Blyth says. “I start him off as an individual who is very much not like how we saw him in the original movies, and then by the end you get to see him stepping into those shoes. Definitely for the last chapter I began to filter in a bit more of, if not Donald’s performance, but the older Snow and that calculated person.”
If Blyth was a newcomer to Collins’ books, his co-star Zegler was much better versed in all things Hunger Games, having read the trilogy at her mother’s insistence. She was particularly taken with protagonist Katniss, who was “such a powerful character and she was young like me”. Zegler’s new character Lucy Grey Baird is also a tribute from the impoverished District 12, reluctantly drafted into the Hunger Games where she is mentored by and romances the young Snow.
But where Katniss was reserved and steely, Lucy Grey is a feisty, outgoing singer and guitar player, who uses her musical skills to charm the audience and improve her chances in the deadly contest.
Zegler shot to fame in her Golden Globe-winning role of Maria in Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed re-imagining of beloved musical West Side Story, and while the singer’s natural tastes and talents lean towards show tunes, she had to go a little bit country for the boot-stomping Lucy Gray.
Zegler says that Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline and Joan Baez were the inspirations for the character’s voice and mastering the genre – with help from producer and sometime Parton associate Dave Cobb and dialect coach Tanera Marshall – proved to be an enjoyable challenge.
“It was so much fun and so different from anything I had gotten to do professionally before,” Zegler says. “I have always sung with a country accent as a joke in the shower and getting to do it on camera and surrounded by such skilled musicians was really amazing.”
Zegler also relished the chance to once again appear in a film with boyfriend Josh Andres Rivera. They’d first met on West Side Story when Rivera played Maria’s spurned lover Chino, whose hate drives him to commit murder, the 28-year-old American actor plays a similarly tortured soul in BOSS.
“Those characters are a bit ill-fated,” says Zegler with a laugh. “But Josh is a great actor and we just loved getting to work together. It’s a lot of fun to get to go to set and see a familiar face and be comforted by the fact that you are in unfamiliar surroundings but there is a grounding presence there.”
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is in cinemas now.
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Originally published as Hunger Games star Tom Blyth revealed how Aussie Oscar-winners helped kickstart his career
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