Tom Blyth explains why moving to U.S. helped him as an actor

Tom Blyth has explained why moving to the U.S. helped him as an actor.

During a recent discussion with his fellow British actor Tim Roth for Interview Magazine, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes star explained that moving to New York at the age of 21 gave him a confidence boost.

"I needed to get out of my own way," he said. "And going to the States, for some reason, gave me way more confidence in my own ability to just f**king throw it out there and have fun with it."

The actor added, "I probably harp on this too much, but I think there's a U.K. thing where we're very judgmental as a people."

Blyth said that he believes this judgment can hold back an actor.

"It's not great for acting, or expressiveness in general, because I think you've got to be unapologetic in many ways about going out on a limb and being ugly and messy and dangerous," he told Roth. "And I don't think being in the U.K. was good for that, so going to the States really helped me just break out of that self-judgement."

Blyth attended New York's famed The Juilliard School, but he admitted it took him "a few years to start getting jobs" after that.

"When I was 27, I got a TV show in the States, a western called Billy the Kid," he continued. "And then shortly after that I got the Hunger Games reboot, which was obviously a big commercial project, but I've always wanted to do the indie thing."

Blyth's breakthrough role was playing the young Coriolanus Snow in the 2023 film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

He will next star in the upcoming independent film Plainclothes and in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.