admin Blyth, whose prior film work included the late Terence Davies’ Benediction, never expected he would be promoting a movie like this. “I’ve started to hate hearing the word ‘franchise’ come out of my mouth,” he says. “Because I never thought that it was going to be something that I would say because I always wanted to do like ‘proper films.'” He adds, “That would be in quotation marks in the piece, and ‘proper’ would be spelled P-R-O-P-A, like in a British accent.”
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, however, felt different to him than the machine he was trying to avoid. He loved the previous films, and when he read the novel while auditioning he thought, “These books are really really good and they are about something more than just, like, superhero powers.” He was drawn to the “really kind of fucked up love story” aspect as well.
Playing “Coryo,” as the character is called, also gave Blyth a chance to undergo a physical transformation, a challenge he loves. On the MGM+ series Billy the Kid, where he plays the title role, he tries to do as much of his stunt horseback riding as possible. Here, he lost weight to portray Coryo at his most destitute in the beginning of the film. “We had to really carefully map out when I could afford to change into slightly beefier Coryo,” he says.
Although Snow is certainly his breakout role, this was not Blyth’s first time on a major film set. In fact, he appeared as “feral child” in Ridley Scott’s 2010 Robin Hood, when he was a young teen while performing with Nottingham’s Television Workshop, a program that counts Samantha Morton and Bella Ramsey as alums. And yet he still went into Ballad thinking that his co-stars—Zegler, who was the star of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and Hunter Schafer, one of the breakouts from Euphoria—were way ahead of him in their careers. It took him a beat to realize he has his own form of experience. “I have like an embarrassingly long CV of like really tiny little parts and things,” he says.
Not that he didn’t learn from Zegler and Schafer. The former could tell him what it’s like to be a focal point on an enormous set; the latter, also a model, shared information about the world of fashion, a universe he’s become more interested in over the past two years. “She was like, ‘These people are way more down to Earth than you think they are,’” he remembers.
