Sam Claflin recently chatted with ELLE Magazine to discuss his role as Finnick Odair in Catching Fire:
Amid all the YA dystopian literature that’s captivated scores of teens and teens-at-heart, there’s hardly been a character so beloved by fans than Finnick Odair of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series. A previous Hunger Games victor who’s brought back into the arena to compete with other past champions, including Katniss and Peeta, Finnick is tall, tan, and beautiful. Thusly, the role presented certain challenges to producers when it came to casting for Catching Fire, the second installment in the HG movie trilogy, out in November. But, in a race that included hunks such as Armie Hammer, Taylor Kitsch and Garrett Hedlund, who should prevail? That would be Sam Claflin, perhaps marginally known for enduring but less-weighty roles in films like Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Snow White and The Huntsman. Fans certainly voiced their concerns about the relative newcomer, but once production photos of Claflin—dyed, tanned, buff—surfaced on the Internet, their fears were quickly quashed. Now, the 27-year-old Brit is poised for international superstardom in one of the most popular franchises of all time.
ELLE: Hello, Sam! Let’s get to it. You’ve said in previous interviews that when you went in for your first Catching Fire audition, you didn’t know what the role was for. How could that be?
Sam Claflin: I was sent over a script and there was no title to what I was reading. It was just two scenes with a character called “Finnick” and a mini-character breakdown. I started reading the scene and saw the name Katniss, and I’d just recently seen The Hunger Games, so I thought, “OK, is this a connection?” But I didn’t know it was a trilogy. I just thought it was a one-time film. So I typed Finnick Odair” into Google an all these book and fan pages came up and I was kind of like, “whoa.” So I just went through all of it and did as much research as I could the night before.
ELLE: And how did that first casting interview go?
SC: I thought I had a pretty good idea of who the character was, but I was pretty off. I thought he was just kind of a bad guy. And obviously he’s kind of painted in that light in the beginning, so I honed in on the fact that he was mysterious and untrustworthy as much as I could. But thank God Frances [Lawrence] was there for my recall because he directed me in a very different way than I was expecting the second time.
ELLE: How so?
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