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TOM BLYTH NEVER thought this interview would happen. During the U.K. press cycle for his latest project, director Cal McMau’s prison drama Wasteman, he told a reporter, “I was never going to have Men’s Health magazine being like, ‘Here’s [Tom Blyth’s] Wasteman prep.’”
Blyth did prep to get physically big for the role of a live wire inmate named Dee—but if he’d had his way, Blyth would have been even bigger, with a physique to match Dee’s outsized personality. When a surprising start date crept up on the film’s production, the actor turned to his drama school toolkit to craft a character rooted in realism rather than sensationalism. He makes up for the difference in his body size with the gargantuan scale of his performance. Dee seeks to command every room by force, even as he begins to lose his grip on that control. Blyth says he trusted McMau to capture Dee’s larger-than-life nature, freeing him to follow his own impulses and instincts within each take, knowing that the camera would capture the story his physicality was telling.
In the end, Dee allowed Blyth to turn the volume up to 11. As an incorrigible inmate dead-set on rising to the top of his new prison’s hierarchy, he sets the tone from his first scene: He swaggers into his tiny cell, takes a piss as if to mark his territory, and immediately strips naked in front of his cellmate, David Jonsson’s more passive Taylor. This primal-yet-playful energy makes it impossible to look away from him inside a pressure cooker environment that supercharges displays of machismo.
When I remind the 31-year-old rising star, now embarking on the film’s U.S. press tour, about his quote from the U.K. cycle, he chuckles and admits he’d forgotten saying it.
Blyth can be forgiven for such a lapse in memory amidst the whirlwind of the past few months. The British-born, Juilliard-trained actor first came to most viewers’ attention as the younger Coriolanus Snow in 2023’s Hunger Games prequel film, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Since then, he’s been on a tear, showcasing his versatility and vulnerability. This latest run began with Sundance darling Plainclothes, in which Blyth portrays a closeted cop who develops an unexpected affection for the target of one of his sting operations. He followed that up with Netflix’s rom-com smash People We Meet on Vacation, where he got to show his lighthearted side as the strait-laced half of a will-they-or-won’t-they couple.
Wasteman may be the capper on this hot streak, but what starts as a chat with Men’s Health about the film soon blossoms into something even bigger. Blyth is thoughtful and circumspect about how to make a name for himself in a competitive industry that has struggled to generate fresh leading men. This leads to a discussion about masculinity, mental health, and the intentional construction of a career built for longevity.
MEN’S HEALTH: Your original aim with Dee was to bulk up and make him a figure like Tom Hardy in Bronson, but you had to change that vision when the production timeline moved up. What tools did you use to pivot so quickly?
TOM BLYTH: I’d read the script about a year and a half before it actually ended up getting made. I’d been sent it and had a meeting with Cal, and the original thinking from both of us was we are going to have three to six months prep time, and I’d be able to get in the gym with a trainer, have a nutritionist, and do what all wanky—especially male—actors love to try and do now and again to test ourselves. And then the film went away… and then it came back. They offered me the part, and it basically got greenlit within two or three weeks. I had just come off the back of filming Plainclothes, where I was playing someone who was in the throes of anxiety and depression. He was a cop, but he was not bulky. I thought, Shit, this is no time at all to get into the body of Dee. In my head, I imagined this big, imposing character. I’m six foot, but I fluctuate between slim and lean and minorly bulky…but like, minorly. I know my metabolism takes a lot of work to get to a point where I actually put on the weight. I thought, What can I do in this limited time?
I spoke to Cal and tried to manage his expectations. I said, “Look, I’m in good shape, but I’m not going to be Tom Hardy in Bronson with this three-week period.” So he just said, “What’s the most realistic version of it we can do?” And I went back to the basics of my actor prep: What are the circumstances he’s living in? What’s the environment he’s living in? That’s a prison environment where he’s eating canteen food every day that’s mass-produced, bulk-cooked with lots of salt and additives. I was like, “I’m gonna eat like a prison inmate. I’m just gonna eat burgers and fries, salt beef sandwiches, things you can make en masse.” I would make myself massive bowls of pasta and bolognese, and try to put on weight as much in protein as in salt.
Blyth and David Jonsson in Wasteman.
Emily Bader and Blyth in People We Meet on Vacation.
Blyth and Rachel Zegler in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
MH: You got into running to find your character, Alex, in People We Meet on Vacation. He doesn’t have as many hard edges as you usually play. Does embodying the physicality of characters help you get into their psychology?
TB: Yeah, massively. A lot of the time, I start with the voice of a character and how they sound. But that’s intrinsically linked to the body, because where you carry your weight and where you lead from in your body changes your voice. I think we all change our voice depending on who we’re speaking to, where we are, or what the objective is of why we’re saying what we’re saying. Voice, movement, and bodily rhythms are where I always begin. For Dee, it was very much that.
Actually, when I was doing the prep, I was reminded of this documentary I saw years ago about cannibal apes. I took it to Cal, and I thought I had a stroke of genius. I was like, “I think he’s a cannibal chimpanzee.” And Cal did not get it. He was like, “Really? Whatever works for you, man, just do it.” My way in was I started playing this idea that he’s this cannibal chimpanzee and has this cheeky, playful side, but he can snap and eat you on a moment’s notice.
MH: How does the task of creating a character change when you have pre-existing expectations to honor, be it a beloved book like People We Meet on Vacation or a previous performance like Donald Sutherland’s in The Hunger Games series?
TB: When you’re working with a script based on a book, inevitably, you want to honor the book and the writer. You still make it your own; you still coin it. But with an original piece of work that is completely from the mind of a scriptwriter, you know that audiences don’t already have some preconceived notion about who you’re supposed to be, so you don’t feel quite so beholden. You can coin it yourself from the ground up. I still do that when I’m doing The Hunger Games or People We Meet. I still coin it; It’s still mine. But I definitely feel that there’s a preconceived idea of where you should take it.
If anything, from an actor’s perspective, the real challenge is to ignore the noise. Producers, writers, and directors can all be really susceptible to the noise as well, especially when it’s a big studio project, and there are lots of people involved in the decision-making. A lot of them are sometimes leading from a place of fear as to whether or not we’re going to meet the fans’ expectations. Part of me is like, we just have to make our own thing. You don’t go to watch the movie of your favorite book to see everything beat-by-beat. And if you do, why? You might as well just stick with what’s in your head! That’s an easy thing for the actor to say because the director’s whole job is to balance everything, and they’ve got so many people in their ears. I think they have a much tougher job in the grand scheme of things because we get to switch off the big picture mindset sometimes.
MH: The three films you’ve released to American audiences over the last seven months are such a study in contrasts—from quiet repression in Plainclothes to maximal expressiveness in Wasteman, then from something as hard-edged as Wasteman to something light in People We Meet on Vacation. Does that come from a conscious desire to stack these contradictory experiences on top of each other?
TB: I think you’re right. To a certain extent, there’s definitely a wanting to counterbalance the last thing you’ve done a little bit. You hear this from actors all the time, but you never want to do the same thing twice. For some people, it works really well. They find that niche, and they get really good at it. If I’ve done something in the past year, I’m not touching it again with a 10-foot barge pole. Not because I didn’t love it, but because the reason I’m an actor is that I want to keep stretching my skin and finding out if my empathy meter can stretch so far in another direction.
I don’t want to become stuck playing one kind of person, either. On a simple level, I enjoy endeavoring to be a chameleon. Sometimes, you achieve that better than others. But I think that’s what makes this job so interesting. When you watch someone whose face is the same, but their energy is different, you’re like, “How have they just become that person? I forgot it was Gary Oldman or Oscar Isaac.” You, as a human, still know it’s them, but they’re doing this almost athletic work to convince you they’re someone else. I find that fascinating.
MH: A thread I noticed in your interviews over the years is an understandable worry that ping-ponging between such different genres and starting from a blank slate with your characters might come at the expense of having your definable “thing.” Have you grown more comfortable defining what that common thread in your star quality is?
TB: If anything, the further along I go, the harder I find it to find a thread. I think the thread is that I’m always looking to do something different. Most of my favorite contemporary actors who are alive today, and were the reason I moved to the States for drama school, are people who you can’t pin down. You can’t really pigeonhole Oscar Isaac: he’s done comedies; he’s done massive sci-fi franchises; he’s done tiny indie crime dramas.
I think I’m like that in life as well. I fucking hate boxes, I really do. I find it so boring that we live in a world now where people seem so keen to identify themselves by the tramlines that they think they must stay within. Identity is useful up to a certain point, but it can also be really limiting. I’ve always felt like my identity is very flexible, and it’s often a mirror of the environment I’m in. I don’t know if that’s healthy or not, or if it’s good. But I want my work to be like that and to be a furtherance of that.
MH: A lot of your roles are in conversation with the construction of masculinity, and you’ve observed that men, in general, try to live up to expectations. What are those expectations in your own life, and have these characters changed the way you think about them at all?
TB: The masculinity conversation is just everywhere at the moment. It’s funny how, as a culture, we get so fixated on trying to dissect one thing. I get it’s because of the bizarre manosphere thing that has happened over the past few years. This idea that men are in a particularly tough time in history, I don’t actually buy. I don’t think we are. I think we’re not used to not being the center of attention, and all of a sudden, it’s making us go, “Oh god, it’s so hard for us right now. How do we define ourselves? Nobody wants to let us be men!” And it’s not true.
You can be a gentleman, a provider, and a protector, all those things that have historically made men men. And you can also be gentle, a listener, and someone who allows women equal opportunity and doesn’t have to take things away from other people in order for you to gain. You can be all those things at once. You don’t have to define yourself as one thing. Sometimes we just overthink it. I suppose if I’ve learned anything from all the various types of men I’ve played in TV and film, it would be that there’s no one answer to what it is. Ambition is the throughline. Their ambition is what derails the personal needs of the characters, and they’re at odds with each other.
MH: You’ve noted that playing big characters like Dee can take its toll over time. How do you manage letting them go and expelling the lingering impact they might have?
TB: It’s not so much that they’re big characters; it’s more what they do and their actions. Playing Lucas in Plainclothes, then playing Dee in Wasteman, and then the character I play in Watch Dogs, all three of them were either really traumatized or traumatizing to other people. Playing those three back-to-back did take a toll. By the time I got to Watch Dogs, I was in quite a dark place. It shot with a pretty small cast in Bulgaria, and I was quite isolated on it. I can’t say too much about it yet, but the nature of how it’s filmed and what happens with the character I’m playing just took a toll on me. By the end of that shoot, I was really in need of a break, to be honest.
Then People We Meet came along, and I thought, Instead of a break, I’m just going to pivot and do something very different and lighter. But it took me a few weeks into that shoot to feel like I’d actually shaken it. When I watch People We Meet, there are certain scenes where I’m like, “Oh, I can see that I was still carrying some of the weight of the other characters before.” I learned that I might need a bit more time to shake off certain characters before I go and try to do a comedy.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Marshall Shaffer is a freelance film critic and journalist based in New York. In addition to Men’s Health, his byline can be found at sites including Slant Magazine, The Playlist, Decider, among other sites. He is a member of the Critics Choice Association.
