Tom Blyth is opening up about the roles he’s been playing in films. Although he is drawn to the complexities of bad guys, he thinks it might be time to play some nice guys.
In a new interview, the actor who played Coriolanus “Coryo” Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes talked about why he’s drawn to these type of characters.
“I’m really drawn to bad guys for some reason, or to morally complex characters. I think that’s because I see the world that way,” he said in an interview with Vman magazine. “I look at people and think, no one’s really good or bad. Everyone’s this huge mix of ambitions and objectives, and they’re all kind of clashing every day. I’m fascinated by the gradients between the two.”
Blyth says he looks at the characters as an “ultimate exercise in empathy, trying to understand the other.”
The actor also played the lead role in Billy the Kid and said he “could never pull the trigger” like that character and “could never do what Coriolanus does in that movie.”
Blyth said that to prepare for the 2023 Hunger Games prequel, he “went down a rabbit hole reading about Vladimir Putin when he was a young man before he joined the KGB. As a young man in school, he probably didn’t know he was going to be who he is now, you know? And I did the same with Benito Mussolini, just like all these dictators.”
Although Blyth’s last two characters have been “bad guys,” he said he recently talked to his agent about diversifying his roles.
“I actually recently discussed with my agent that maybe it’s time to play some nice guys for a bit,” he said. “Just because the last two films I’ve done, including the one I’m doing right now, they’re very morally complex characters, if not verging on evil.”
He continued, “It’s so much fun getting to do stuff that you would never do in real life, and I try to find what’s so delicious about it. But it does take a toll. I get more tired of playing those guys. At the end of the day, I’m emotionally taxed.”
