Tom Blyth says he ‘took control’ in ‘intimate’ sex scene with Russell Tovey in new gay cop movie

Tom Blyth, of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes fame, is starring in a new gay romantic thriller about cops called Plainclothes.

Directed by Carmen Emmi, Plainclothes sees Blyth playing Lucas, a working-class undercover police officer who is tasked with entrapping and apprehending gay men for public indecency in 90s Syracuse, New York.

But, Lucas discovers he himself might be closeted when he falls in love with Andrew (Russell Tovey). The only catch is that Andrew is one of his targets in an ongoing sting operation.

Blyth said that he was immediately keen to do the film when he read the script, and luckily he found himself to be a “creative match” with Emmi from the “get-go”, according to Variety.

While filming Plainclothes, Blyth and Tovey made use of an intimacy coordinator who helped them with their sex scenes.

Blyth told Variety: “It was really intimate, really vivid, and Joey [Massa, the intimacy coordinator] was incredible. It felt very organic.”

In fact, Blyth said Massa helped him to take control during several intimate scenes with Tovey.

“It felt like we rehearsed it in a way where I think Russell and I both were made to feel confident and comfortable enough that we could lead it. I think it works best when the actors feel emboldened to be able to take control of the choreography and make it feel organic,” he said.

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Emmi first “got the idea” for Plainclothes in 2016, when he “read an article in the Los Angeles Times about undercover police officers who were arresting men in a Long Beach park bathroom”.

“Around that time, when I read the article, my brother was becoming a police officer and through my conversations with him and thinking about my own coming out experience, the character of Lucas was born,” he said in a piece posted to the Sundance Film Festival website, where the film is due to premiere this week.

Emmi set the film in his hometown as well and set it in the 90s, “which was around the time that I started suppressing my feelings as a boy,” he said.

“I think that I made this as a way for my 7-year-old self to finally exhale,” Emmi added.

Blyth was unaware that the sting operations depicted in Plainclothes happened as late as the 90s when he first accepted the offer to play Lucas.

Speaking to Variety, he said: “I knew about it happening up until the ’50s, but I think I wrongly and naively assumed that it died out. One of the first things Carmen did was send me the article that inspired the story from the early 2000s. I remember being really shocked by how recent it was.”

Blyth is best known for playing Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, alongside Rachel Zegler as well as appearing in Billy the Kid and The Gilded Age.

He is also expected to star in People We Meet On Vacation, an adaptation of Emily Henry’s book of the same name.