Tom Blyth on Playing a Closeted Gay Cop in ‘Plainclothes’ and His ‘Intimate, Really Vivid’ Sex Scenes With Russell Tovey
Marc Malkin Senior Editor, Culture and Events Tom Blyth may have starred in Francis Lawrence’s box office hit “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” but that doesn’t mean the British actor is moving on from independent film.
Case in point: “Plainclothes.” In writer-director Carmen Emmi’s feature debut, Blyth stars as Lucas, an undercover cop in 1990s Syracuse, N.Y., who falls in love with Andrew (Russell Tovey), one of his targets in a sting operation going after gay men for public indecency in a mall bathroom. “There is just something really refreshing about the scrappiness of a smaller film like [“Plainclothes”],” Blyth tells me during a Zoom video interview for this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast from Senegal, where he is shooting Claire Denis’ “The Cry of the Guards.” “I’ve done a bunch of them this year and last year.
I’ve gone back to that kind of on purpose. It reminds you why you got into this in the first place. It reminds you of being a 15-year-old kid with my neighbor with a camcorder making those zombie films in my backyard.” “Plainclothes” premieres at Sundance on Jan.
26. Not that Blyth would mind returning for the upcoming “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” sequel. “Rachel [Zegler]and I are not going to be in this one because the next one takes place 45 years after ours did.
