Tom Blyth Talks Rom-coms, ‘Wasteman’ and Life After ‘Hunger Games’

Despite charming the pants off of Netflix subscribers along with his first foray into the rom-com house, Tom Blyth nonetheless cannot get used to the sunshine and enjoyable stuff. The 31-year-old spent a lot of the beginning of the yr buzzing round in promotion of “People We Meet on Vacation,” a friends-to-lovers ebook adaptation film. Yet he is rather more snug the place he’s now, chatting by means of jail reform and the manosphere because it pertains to his darkish crime thriller “Wasteman.”

“I kind of love that,” the actor says of the whiplash. “No one quite knows what to expect.”

The English actor first broke out within the MGM+ sequence “Billy the Kid” earlier than becoming a member of “The Hunger Games” mega-franchise within the 2023 film “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” Since then he is plugged away at varied darkish indies, together with final yr’s Sundance hit “Plainclothes,” Claire Denis’ “The Fence” and now the British jail drama “Wasteman,” out April 17 within the US

In the midst of all that, Blyth confronted her fears of doing a romantic comedy and starred as Alex in “People We Meet on Vacation,” primarily based on the ebook by Emily Henry. The story follows finest associates Poppy, performed by Emily Baderand Alex, who takes a trip collectively each summer season. A serious battle one journey results in them not talking for years, earlier than they meet up once more in Barcelona, ​​the place their friendship now has the potential to be one thing extra. The film immediately grew to become the number-one movie on Netflix the week of its premiere.

Blyth initially turned down the function of Alex — greater than as soon as.

“I wasn’t sure a rom-com was right for me right now. I think I was always nervous to do a rom-com because it almost didn’t feel like a serious move for an actor,” he says, wearing an array of Burberry, Armani Todd Snyder by his stylist Michael Fisher. “But I was wrong, because then I did three quite serious roles that weighed quite heavy on me and I was so eager to do something light.”

Blyth says it’s “100 percent true” that he is extra snug taking part in darkish and heavy than the levity of somebody like Alex.

“I like doing comedy. I like doing witty dialogue. I like doing even the light stuff. It was more than Alex…I didn’t realize until getting into the shooting of it, but basically the purpose he serves is to [what Henry calls] the fantasy of the female gaze, essentially. It’s like the perfect boyfriend who is just steady, shows up, is reliable. “All issues which might be nice in life, however in storytelling are fairly boring,” Blyth says. “In a younger character, you are making an attempt to search for the arduous edges to carry onto, and he is fairly comfortable on the sides. And I got here from taking part in a whole lot of hard-around-the-edges characters, and it was simply jarring. In a humorous approach, it was jarring to play him, but in addition refreshing. Once I let go of the necessity to discover the form of crunchiness, I fairly loved taking part in along with his comfortable underbelly of emotion.”

As with all of Henry’s books, “People We Meet on Vacation” comes with a passionate — and protecting — fan base. The strain to do it justice was acquainted to Blyth from his expertise of taking part in a younger President Snow within the “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”

“It’s nice to feel the support,” Byth says. “I went through a similar thing with ‘Hunger Games’ in terms of fans who were just really all in on the writer, and that taught me not to have a reason to fear because they actually, as long as you go in with an open heart and you try and do justice to their beloved character, they actually give you quite a lot of space to do your thing with it.”

In “Wasteman,” he stars as Dee, a brash, violent inmate who unleashes chaos on his new cellblock roommate, Taylor, performed by David Jonsson, simply as Taylor is near getting out.

Blyth was instantly all in favour of Dee’s unpredictability and making an attempt to know his inner motivations.

“There was a version of this character that I think Cal [McMau, the director] first wanted me to play, which is just this kind of psychopath — but they’ve basically proven that psychopaths don’t exist. Everyone is capable of some sort of empathy, and so it’s really just about finding what is his vulnerability, what is his empathy, and then covering it up. “All those layers I thought were exciting to me.”

The confines of the jail and the depth of the cinematography make “Wasteman” a claustrophobic, unrelenting expertise, with Dee sucking up the oxygen of each scene he enters. Blyth describes the expertise as “weirdly cathartic.”

“I think we are so often told that taking up space is rude or impolite, especially in the UK You’re very much told that to take up any space or to breathe too much air is to take away from other people, and that’s impolite or to be frowned upon. And so from an acting perspective, it was cathartic and refreshing to play someone who unapologetically just takes up space,” Blyth says. “It’s not how I live my life really most of the time. Sometimes I’d be playing Dee and I’d stay in character throughout the day, and then my little Tom brain in the back would come in and be like, ‘You’re doing too much if you’re taking up too much space,’ and I had to shut him up.”

Blyth’s profession was opened up after the success and scale of “Songbirds & Snakes.”

“It just allowed me a bit more choice than I’d previously had. And certainly it wasn’t like a shoe-in — it wasn’t like everyone knocking on the door. But certainly people, when they see that and there was an appreciation for what we’d made, I think people start to take it a bit more seriously,” he says. “Also, I feel we introduced intricacy to a style that does not all the time have intricacy, however that franchise does. And we continued the legacy they began, with making an attempt to make deep work, despite the fact that it is a huge blockbuster.

“And so I feel individuals noticed that and took it significantly, which is all the time my worry with doing it within the first place. I used to be like, ‘Do individuals take these huge blockbusters significantly?’ Because I need to do cool indies and actually heartfelt tasks. And really it simply blew my expectations out of the water and allowed me to then go and do ‘Plainclothes,’ ‘Wasteman,’ ‘Watch Dogs’ and issues like that that I won’t have been seen in any other case.”

Blyth has been performing since he was 12 years previous, after his household moved from Yorkshire to Nottingham, England, and his mom inspired him to attend The Television Workshop, a coaching faculty within the arts that Blyth calls “the working man’s” drama program.

“It was in a dingy basement in the middle of Nottingham City and we all went once or twice a week and were handed out scripts and we had to just get in the ring and just play,” he recollects. “But it had a lot of grit to it. Even though everyone was young, it was gritty work being done, not overly theatrical and jazz hands.” It was there, in that basement, that Blyth realized that performing was precisely what he wished to do “for real.”

With a blockbuster, a string of indies and now a rom-com beneath his belt, Blyth would like to ebook a play within the close to future, however can be making an attempt to settle into this new stage of his profession.

“It’s hard to let go of a scarcity mindset. That’s what I’m learning,” he says. “It’s really hard to presume that you’re going to keep working and so you kind of want to grab onto anything that comes your way, but I’m trying to learn to say just because there are offers coming doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing for me.”

He’s been again to again since “Hunger Games” and is now beginning to notice there could be some profit to hitting pause.

“It’s so easy to get on a hamster wheel and not get off, especially nowadays where people’s attention spans are so short. I think people worry if they’re not constantly front and center, they’re going to fall into redundancy or something and not be relevant,” he says. “But the reality is, I think if you’re doing good work, people will always find it. That’s my mantra for myself.”