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

Despite charming the pants off of Netflix subscribers with his first foray into the rom-com space, Tom Blyth still can’t get used to the light and fun stuff. The 31-year-old spent much of the start of the year buzzing around in promotion of “People We Meet on Vacation,” a friends-to-lovers book adaptation movie. Yet he’s much more comfortable where he is now, chatting through prison reform and the manosphere as it relates to his dark 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 in the MGM+ series “Billy the Kid” before joining “The Hunger Games” mega-franchise in the 2023 movie “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” Since then he’s plugged away at various dark indies, including last year’s Sundance hit “Plainclothes,” Claire Denis’ “The Fence” and now the British prison drama “Wasteman,” out April 17 in the U.S.

In the midst of all that, Blyth faced his fears of doing a romantic comedy and starred as Alex in “People We Meet on Vacation,” based on the book by Emily Henry. The story follows best friends Poppy, played by Emily Bader, and Alex, who take a vacation together every summer. A major fight one trip leads to them not speaking for years, before they meet up again in Barcelona, where their friendship now has the potential to be something more. The movie instantly became the number-one film on Netflix the week of its premiere.

Blyth initially turned down the role of Alex — more than once. 

“I wasn’t sure a rom-com was right for me right now. I think I always was nervous to do a rom-com because it almost didn’t feel like a serious move for an actor,” he says, dressed in 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 is “100 percent true” that he’s more comfortable playing dark and heavy than the levity of someone like Alex. 

“I like doing comedy. I like doing witty dialogue. I like doing even the light stuff. It was more that 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 things that are great in life, but in storytelling are quite boring,” Blyth says. “In a young character, you’re trying to look for the hard edges to hold onto, and he’s quite soft on the edges. And I come from playing a lot of hard-around-the-edges characters, and it was just jarring. In a funny way, it was jarring to play him, but also refreshing. Once I let go of the need to find the kind of crunchiness, I quite enjoyed playing with his soft underbelly of emotion.”

As with all of Henry’s books, “People We Meet on Vacation” comes with a passionate — and protective — fan base. The pressure to do it justice was familiar to Blyth from his experience of playing a young President Snow in 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 to not 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, played by David Jonsson, just as Taylor is close to getting out. 

Blyth was immediately interested in Dee’s unpredictability and trying to understand his internal 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 think were exciting to me.”

The confines of the prison and the intensity of the cinematography make “Wasteman” a claustrophobic, unrelenting experience, with Dee sucking up the oxygen of every scene he enters. Blyth describes the experience as “weirdly cathartic.”

“I think we are so often told that taking up space is rude or impolite, especially in the U.K. 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 career 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 think we brought intricacy to a genre that doesn’t always have intricacy, but that franchise does. And we continued the legacy they started, with trying to make deep work, even though it’s a big blockbuster.

“And so I think people saw that and took it seriously, which is always my fear with doing it in the first place. I was like, ‘Do people take these big blockbusters seriously?’ Because I want to do cool indies and really heartfelt projects. And actually it just blew my expectations out of the water and allowed me to then go and do ‘Plainsclothes,’ ‘Wasteman,’ ‘Watch Dogs’ and things like that that I might not have been seen for otherwise.”

Blyth has been acting since he was 12 years old, after his family moved from Yorkshire to Nottingham, England, and his mother encouraged him to attend The Television Workshop, a training school in 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 recalls. “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 acting was exactly what he wanted to do “for real.” 

With a blockbuster, a string of indies and now a rom-com under his belt, Blyth would love to book a play in the near future, but is also trying to settle into this new stage of his career. 

“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 back to back since “Hunger Games” and is now starting to realize there might be some benefit 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.”