TV & Movies

Hunger Games director compares Donald Sutherland and Tom Blyth’s President Snow

Lucy-Jo Finnighan
President Snow in the Ballad of Songbirds and The Hunger GamesLionsgate

We’ve seen his fall, now we’ll get to see his rise, as President Snow returns for the prequel Hunger Games movie Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

Welcome, welcome, to the 10th Annual Hunger Games. Or should we say, to the new Hunger Games prequel movie, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

This prequel novel, which came out in 2020 features the origin story of President Snow and how the Hunger Games came to be fully formed. Now the movie is almost here, and people are hyped.

The concept of the story is in itself intriguing, depicting how a dictator came to be. Here, Tom Blyth will be taking on the role of Coriolanus Snow, originally portrayed by Donald Sutherland. But how do the two compare in terms of performance? Well, the movie’s director and producer have the answer.

Hunger Games director and producer compare Snow in Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

In an interview with Dexerto, Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson discussed the differences between the two Snow actors.

For Lawrence, Sutherland and Blyth are “entirely different, for many reasons. I think one is that when we cast Tom, I wanted there to be some minimal sort of physical resemblances and things, but the truth is I didn’t want him to mimic Donald Sutherland at all.

“I didn’t want him to try and do his voice or his mannerisms or anything like that. And that’s partially just because we’re meeting Snow at such a sort of young, unformed age, that I wanted Tom to be able to just own the performance. But because he’s unformed, I think we were dealing with very different kinds of topics to talk about, Tom and I, and a very different kind of journey.

“So when you’re dealing with Donald, who’s a very different kind of actor, but also is a very different kind of character, and is fully formed, and has his philosophies within already, yeah they’re just completely different experiences.”

Jacobson pulled some similarities, mainly physical, stating: “With somebody like with Tom, playing a young Coriolanus Snow, there are a lot of people who you just take one look at them, and for whatever reason you’re like that person just could never grow up to look like Donald Sutherland. Either the shape of their face, the shape of their eyes, you know. Hair color doesn’t mean that much, but there is just, we had to believe that this person could credibly grow into the older man that we know as President Snow in the original movies.

“For Tom to play Snow you have to play both hero and villain. Neither hero nor villain. And a guy who’s constantly torn between the two. And Tom certainly has the chops for that, he’s such a refined, and he has incredible composure that also felt right for Snow. But he also just has incredible craft.”

The prequel follows this synopsis: “Years before he becomes the tyrannical president of Panem, 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow remains the last hope for his fading lineage. With the 10th annual Hunger Games fast approaching, the young Snow becomes alarmed when he’s assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird from District 12. Uniting their instincts for showmanship and political savvy, they race against time to ultimately reveal who’s a songbird and who’s a snake.”

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is now in cinemas. Check out our other Hunger Games coverage below:

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