When 28-year-old Tom Blyth, a Juilliard graduate best known for the MGM+ series Billy the Kid and an appearance on HBO’s The Gilded Age, learned that he would be leading the next Hunger Games film, he panicked. “I definitely went into this thinking, This massive machine is gonna consume me—eat me up and spit me out,” he tells me on the latest episode of Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast. “The fans are gonna hate me online, [they’re] not going to think I’m the right person for the job, and Francis [Lawrence] won’t be accessible as a director because he’ll be too busy.”

Blyth had reason to let a few negative thoughts prevail. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel set about 60 years before Suzanne Collins’s original trilogy, is built on risk. Its main character is a boyhood version of Donald Sutherland’s towering President Snow, the franchise’s eventual villain. And by playing him, Blyth would be stepping into the leading role space last occupied by the arrow-slinging Katniss Everdeen, brought to life by Jennifer Lawrence mere months before she won an Academy Award.

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But the odds turned out to be ever in Blyth’s favor—thanks, in part, to a movie that manages to launch a fresh class of characters into the rich landscape that many other YA-targeted dystopian films have failed to emulate. “It felt like making a beautiful indie movie together that just happens to already have a built-in fanbase, which is kind of like a dream as a filmmaker because there’s a hunger for it already,” says Blyth, “Pardon the pun.”

On this week’s Little Gold Men, Blyth reflects on the franchise’s past, future and what it’s grappling with in Snow’s present: “You see everything that he could be if he took the honorable path. You get to see his potential. And the audience gets to fall in love with the potential and then be devastated when he may or may not live up to that potential as a human being. Hopefully, even though [the audience] know where he’s going to end up, they can spend two-plus-hours rooting for him to do the right thing. It was mostly an exercise in forgetting where he’s going up to end up and just being with him in the now.” Listen below, and read a partial transcript of the conversation.

Vanity Fair: It felt so cool to see this film in theaters because we’re in a similar age bracket and kind of grew up with The Hunger Games at the height of its popularity. What was your relationship with the originals—were you dressing up for midnight screenings or more removed from it?

Tom Blyth: I didn’t ever dress up for this one. I used to go to Star Wars screenings and stuff dressed up—Harry Potter. But I was a big fan of the movies and I did go and see them every time they came out. Me and my mom used to take my younger sister to go and see them. So this was a pretty full circle moment, like having my family in the audience the other day at the world premiere in London. Francis handed me a mic to deliver the speech to welcome people to the screening. I looked up and saw my mom and sister in the back row and getting to bring it specifically to them was a pretty cool moment.

When you learn of the prequel and audition for this role, do you go back and revisit the films?

It’s funny, it’s kind of like a catch-22 because you want to get immersed back into the universe and storytelling language that is in the original films. But at the same time, because I’m one of the few characters in this movie that is also in the other movies, you want to be careful not to copy or try and recreate everything. Donald Sutherland is so good and specific and memorable in those original films.

Francis Lawrence and I both felt this risk or this trap that we could fall into trying to recreate some sort of Donald Sutherland impersonation. So very early on, we talked about specifically not doing that and playing this kid as a kid—someone who is 64 years younger and very different from where he ends up in the original films. The film is basically split up into three chapters and each chapter is a significant moment where he transitions from boy to man and then man to future president. The last chapter, when we started filming those scenes, I did go back and start looking at some of Donald’s scenes in the original films and also some from films when he was younger just to filter a little bit more of that into the performance. To bring Coryo one step closer to the older version that he’s about to become.

Some actors say that when you play a villainous character, you don’t approach the person as a villain. You have to justify their decisions and not side against the character you’re playing. But in this film, we see Coriolanus Snow shift into the villain we’ll see in later films. Is there an exact moment you felt that shift the most?

I definitely felt that if I judge this guy, then I won’t be able to play him fairly. I had to forget about all the stuff that he’s going to do in the later films and basically, in my eyes, make him a hero—or, at least make him the main character in my story in the same way that you or I are the main character in our stories.

In terms of the moments where he changes, the first one is meeting Lucy Gray [played by Rachel Zegler]. She tests everything that he thinks he knows about the Panem and the districts. Lucy Gray tests his expectation because he thinks they’re all barbarians and uneducated. He’s been taught and told by the Capitol that they’re all lesser than himself. Then he meets this person who is enigmatic and magical and a performer and witty and she can outsmart him on any day of the week. And he’s enamored by her. That is what wakes him up to the fact that they’re all human and just trying to get by in the same way no matter where they are.

There’s one moment where Lucy shares some food with him and says, “I thought there was plenty of food in the Capitol.” That’s the first moment where he lets his guard down. He says to her, “You would think so, but tell that to my Grandma because she’s starving too.” There’s this moment of humanity between them where they both realized that what they thought the other person represented might not actually be true. But in that vulnerability also comes him discovering his own weakness and he’s terrified of weakness. That’s one of the first moments where he starts to become afraid of letting the facade drop.

Some have drawn parallels between Snow and some more modern figures. He inflates his personal wealth, has a talent for producing reality TV, is going to become president—

Oh, I wonder who you’re talking about…

Exactly. How much did the modern parallels come to bear on your performance?

We all have this morbid fascination with those people because they are so sad, and thankfully in some ways, once in a generation, those people come along who we’re all like, “How are they getting away with these outright lies?” I will say Snow actually doesn’t lie. He is someone who tricks and is willing to go to lengths to make sure his mentee wins the games. He’s not so honorable when he’s younger that he’s not willing to cheat, but he’s not a liar. Even in the later films, if you ask that character he would say he was telling the truth—but his truth is just darker than most.

He doesn’t believe in the kindness of humans, he believes that humans are barbaric and they have to be controlled. But he is telling the truth. Whereas the people I think you’re alluding to, we live in a time where lying is so normal for people in power. People can say what they want to get to whatever end and I don’t think that is Snow. That is not even necessarily the question that Suzanne Collins is asking. If anything, she’s asking: what is the true nature of humans? Are they inherently chaotic and bad and dangerous to each other? Or are they inherently good and loving and the kind of evil that can creep in is more a product of circumstance.

I think you can’t help but draw parallels because the thing that really connects them all is a desire for power, right? President Snow in this fictional world, but then also all these modern-day leaders and historically too, whether that’s Putin or Trump or Stalin or even Mussolini or Hitler, these people were just so hungry for power and it came from most likely a fear of not being in control.

Many of the reasons why we’re rooting for him lie in the scenes that you share with Rachel Zegler, who plays Lucy Gray. The dynamic between your characters is romantic, it’s adversarial, there’s mentorship. How do you build that complicated relationship?

So before the movie started filming, I had been cast and was going through chemistry reads with potential Lucy Grays. What I didn’t know at the time was that Rachel had already been the first pick for Lucy Gray and had turned it down because she’d been working back-to-back on a bunch of projects and was in London and hadn’t seen her family, her boyfriend, in like a year. So, she was just desperate to go home and get some home time.

[In the end, Zegler’s boyfriend, Josh Andrés Rivera, wound up playing fellow Capitol mentor Sejanus Plinth in the film.]

Then she kind of came back into the mix at the end of my audition process. We got to then read together and just instantly felt that there was some magic. The minute she started singing in the scene, all the noise was quiet. If you haven’t heard her sing, it is like she’s been touched by something angelic. She sat at a kitchen table in London and I’m at my kitchen table in Brooklyn and I immediately was like, it’s going to be really easy for me to fall for her on screen. It was kind of a magical moment.

Then Rachel and I started texting and sending voice notes to each other about the characters and our lives trying to connect. Then we met in person for the first time in Poland when Josh and I had already been filming for maybe two weeks. I met her at midnight when she got off the flight and we gave each other a hug. And she was straight into work the next day. Then I got COVID immediately after that in Poland. So we met, she started filming, and then I was out for 10 days. But she would update me every day and tell me how the day had gone. It was a pretty arduous shoot, so it was good to have a partner in crime there to lean on.

Did you get the opportunity to speak with Donald Sutherland or get advice from any of the original cast?

We didn’t. I don’t think any of us spoke to the original cast and that was kind of by design from Francis. I think he wanted this to feel like we weren’t picking up a baton that had been dropped in the relay race. This is a chapter that is set 64 years before Katniss, before Cornelius Snow is a president. The only two characters that cross over are Tigris [played by Hunter Schafer] and Coryo.

We didn’t have any contact until we all got the news that Jen Lawrence had been interviewed on the red carpet somewhere about how she felt about it. She sent a message to us, via a media outlet, basically saying good luck to everyone, hope it goes well, which we all needed because halfway through we were like, “Oh God, I hope we’re living up to the hopes and dreams of people who love this franchise. I hope we’re not shooting Jen in the back.” But to get her blessing meant a lot to us, even though it was from afar.

Donald I hadn’t spoken to and still haven’t, again that was kind of by design to not in any way try to imitate him. Because I think had I met him, I would have tried to do an imitation of him and that would have been not fun for anyone.

You share the screen with heavyweights like Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman, and Viola Davis, who seems to be having the time of her life onscreen. Those are some towering presences—what’s it like to act opposite them?

I was super intimidated at first. The minute Viola was cast I was like, “Are you kidding me? Am I worthy? Do I really get to do this with her?” But they couldn’t have been more welcoming and supportive.

Jason came in on his first day super excited and I couldn’t work out why. He was basically like, “How cool that we get to be here, man,” like it was his first job. And that just speaks to what he’s like. He’s truly so thankful that we get to play for a living and get to tell stories. It was great to be reminded of that halfway through the five-and-a-half month shoot, [where] you get pretty tired and you start to take it for granted a little bit. He came in and injected the whole cast and crew with childlike appreciation for what we get to do. Then I found out he watched my show, Billy the Kid, which is crazy to me because I didn’t think he had any idea who I was, nor should he. And there he was asking me, “What happens next? When’s the next season out?” And I was like, “What, dude? I’m supposed to be asking you these questions. I’ve been watching you on TV and movies since I was a kid.”

Peter became kind of a good friend over the course of the shoot and gave me a lot of advice. Viola just led by example. And she’s having fun with it. I expected her to be super serious, but she’s coming in and she’s playing. And I was like, “Oh, that’s what it is. She’s just playing a part, but playing it really well and really truthfully.” Then at the end of the day, she’s like, “Well, that was fun. Cool. I’m going to have a margarita.” That’s who she is, that’s why she’s so good.

If Suzanne Collins were to write a new book tomorrow, which chapter of Snow’s life would you be most interested in exploring?

Hunter and I had dinner last night and were talking about it and we both feel pretty strongly that Tigris and Snow’s relationship, we want to see [more of] that. I think fans of the books want to see that. I do want to see what happens to Lucy Gray because the end of the book is left so ambiguous and you just don’t know where she ends up—literally and metaphorically. Where in the hell does Lucy Gray go and what does she do and what happens between Tigris and Coryo because the end of the film definitely feels like they’re on the precipice of the great falling out that then leads to Tigris helping the rebellion against him later in Mockingjay: Part Two.

This interview has been edited and condensed.