The Ballad of Songbirds & Snake: Tom Blyth Talks Following in Donald Sutherland's Footsteps
The Coriolanus Snow in the new Hunger Games prequel isn't going to be the same character you remember from the original movies.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes hits theaters this month, and turns back the clock on one of the biggest characters from the original trilogy. Based on Suzanne Collins' acclaimed prequel of the same name, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set 64 years before the Hunger Games, when future president Coriolanus Snow was just finishing with school and getting involved with the games. After being played by Donald Sutherland in the first four movies, this younger iteration of Snow is being taken on by actor Tom Blyth.
While they're playing the same character, don't expect Blyth's Snow to be just like Sutherland's. During a virtual press conference for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which ComicBook.com attended, Blyth was asked about the differences between his Snow and the one we all remember seeing in the original films.
"Yeah, I kind of had to reserve or refrain myself from going down the rabbit hole of watching all those movies again and watching his performance again," Blyth said. "Obviously the first instinct I had was to try and recreate it somehow or to nod to it in kind of a savvy way. But the thing is that's never going to be slick. It's never going to be savvy. Everyone's going to be like, 'It feels like you're copying a performance that has already been great.' And you can't, the minute as an actor you try to recreate anything that works, whether it's something you've done or something another actor has done, it's the death of spontaneity, and you just can't recreate. It has to be fresh and it has to be in that moment. So very early on I kind of put that to the side and Francis [Lawrence] and I talked about making my own and also just asking what drives him now as opposed to what drives him later on when he is president and a dictator and a tyrant."
As anyone who has read the prequel book already knows, this younger version of Coriolanus Snow is much different than the one in the original Hunger Games trilogy. That alone gave Blyth a lot of freedom to make the character his own.
"He has a different character in this movie. In the book, he's a character who is a brother and a grandson and a student and an ambitious kid who just wants to do well in his life," Blyth explained. "And then by the end of the movie he's something totally different because of his relationship to Lucy Gray and because of his relationship to the Capitol in general and what he sees and what he learns, and the beauty of the film is that you get to see that transition in real time, and that's what draws me to him so much as a character. And I think what fans are drawn to as a character is seeing that he's not just one thing, he ends up as a tyrant, but 64 years before that he was something else entirely. And the interesting part is seeing what he goes through to get there."
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes arrives in theaters on November 17th.
