It’s a certain type of character who can be found lunching at New York City’s The Crosby Street Hotel’s Crosby Bar at 2 p.m. on a weekday. But, if you survey the scene closely enough on this slightly overcast November Wednesday, you’ll notice that tucked among the dilettantes, ladies who lunch, and rosé-sniffing aesthetes, is a bonafide movie star. Luckily for Sam Claflin, who reprises his role as bronzed Merman Finnick Odair in today’s fourth and final installment of the Hunger Games saga, Mockingjay – Part 2, everyone is either too engrossed in their own conversations or too cool to harass the foppish Brit twirling his rum cocktail in the corner. Though the 29-year-old actor certainly commands attention—after all, this is the guy who can make eating a sugar cube look like lascivious foreplay—there’s also something charmingly unassuming about him. And to hear Claflin gush about his wife, Da Vinci’s Demons actress Laura Haddock, is to know exactly what this guy is all about. So when he’s not partying with Brad and Angie (seriously), rest assured that this family man is at home with his leading lady and their beloved Cockapoo, Rosie, painstakingly creating Iggy Azalea karaoke videos. Does he contradict himself? Very well then.
There’s a pivotal scene in Mockingjay – Part 2 in which you take down a pack of grotesque CGI mutts. All my colleague Sally could talk about was how ripped your back muscles looked…
Oh no! That’s the only moment that I didn’t actually do [laughs]. That was the one stunt of the entire movie. Anyway, by the time we got to the fight sequence I was exhausted and tired and cold and hungry and no one had spoken to each other for like three weeks because we were all so miserable.
That sounds brutal.
The really difficult thing was that everyone else got machine guns and all I had was a trident! There were so many moments in the script up to that point where I didn’t actually get to do anything. I was just sort of standing behind everyone else looking after Josh [Hutcherson]’s character. When we actually got around to getting into the sewers, and doing the close combat kind of stuff, I got to play around a little bit more.
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