Tom Blyth takes on the character made famous by Donald Sutherland as the antagonist of the earlier films. <\/p>
Although most of the characters in the new Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes<\/a> won\u2019t be familiar to fans of the original films, there is one very major exception.<\/p>\n Tom Blyth takes on the role of a young Coriolanus Snow, with the film providing the origin story of his descent into darkness before he became the villainous Panem President played by Donald Sutherland in the earlier movies.<\/p>\n But although he might have the same name, it\u2019s likely that viewers might not instantly recognise him as the same character.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a very different version of the character because he\u2019s not become the president yet, he has not become kind of his evil self yet,\u201d Blyth explained in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com<\/a>. \u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo I was very wary of kind of getting there too soon with him. Because I think the reason people are gonna enjoy this is seeing a version of him that they don\u2019t know yet, before he kind of turns bad.\u201d<\/p>\n Blyth added that he broke the character into three different parts to help explore his transition into an antagonist \u2013 \u2018Coryo\u2019, the \u201cnaive\u201d but \u201cambitious\u201d version we see at the beginning, \u2018Coriolanus\u2019, the middle version who is \u201cstepping into manhood\u201d and finally \u2018future President Snow\u2019 who is more similar to the version from the other films.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Read more:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI think the only thing I tried to do in any way that nodded towards the Coryo that we\u2019ve already seen is towards the end, there\u2019s a vocal shift,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I think you\u2019ll notice\u2013 it\u2019s also in the writing of the script \u2013 you can just sense that he\u2019s kind of built this wall up now, he\u2019s built this facade that he\u2019s going to carry forward with him. So I think towards the end of the film, you kind of see that start to creep in a little bit.\u201d<\/p> Meanwhile, director Francis Lawrence \u2013 who previously helmed three of the other four Hunger Games films \u2013 explains that although he did look for some similarities to Sutherland during the casting process, he was also keen for Blyth to go his own way.<\/p>\n\n