Hunger Games’ director says Tom Blyth ‘caught me off guard’ as Coriolanus Snow

polygon.com:

Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson’s performances as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark defined the original Hunger Games movies. But the prequel movie, set 64 years before Katniss and Peeta’s story, needed a new set of actors who could hold their own.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is an origin story for Panem’s dictator, President Coriolanus Snow. It takes fans back to a time when Coriolanus was just an ambitious young student who had not yet become the cutthroat politician we see in the main books and movies. His story is entwined with that of Lucy Gray Baird, the District 12 Tribute he’s assigned to mentor, whose natural flair for showmanship and captivating songs inspire him to turn the brutal Hunger Games into more of a flashy spectacle.

Director Francis Lawrence tells Polygon the filmmakers were looking for fresh faces when it came to the lead roles. A lot of actors auditioned for the role of Snow, specifically, but Lawrence says Billy the Kid star Tom Blyth immediately “blew everybody out of the water.”

“Part of it is physical,” he admits. “He has those great blue eyes — [you] could see in his face, Okay, I could buy that maybe 65 years later, he could turn into Donald Sutherland.”

But it wasn’t just about how feasibly Blyth could look like a younger Donald Sutherland. Whoever landed the role had to walk a line between being charming and conniving, someone you want to root for, yet aren’t surprised when they end up turning into a villain. Blyth brought his acting chops to the role, and Lawrence was continually impressed throughout filming.

“Telling a story about a young man’s descent into darkness, you have to have somebody that can earn the audience’s empathy, but then believably also