Sam Claflin Finally Confirms What Hunger Games Fans Have Been Saying All Along
Sam Claflin made his big screen debut playing Philip Swift in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), which earned him a nomination for Best Male Newcomer in the 17th Empire Awards.
However, his first major role was Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), which he later reprised in Parts 1 and 2 of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay.
Finnick became a fan favorite back when he appeared in the books, a shallow playboy on the first glance, who is, however, soon revealed to be one of the most heroic and reliable characters in the story. And given the massive popularity of the Hunger Games at that point, the competition for the role must have been fierce.
As Claflin remembered in his conversation with Variety, detractors of his casting were numerous.
"You were so wrong for this.' 'They should have cast this person or this person, not you,'" he remembered hearing things like this after being selected to play Finnick. He reacted with "Okay, I'm gonna prove you wrong!"
And he did.
Despite some minor flaws in Claflin's performance, mainly his accent, the general consensus today is that he was an ideal Finnick – he looked the part, with his eyes green eyes and matching build, and he played the role well enough.
The fandom has only one complaint about Finnick – the fact that he died around the middle of the final movie, sacrificing himself to give Katniss an opportunity to escape from mutated lizard monsters, sent out to hunt them. His death struck even harder because his wife Annie (Stef Dawson) gave birth to their child just a few months after he died.
And to some extent Claflin agreed with the fans in the above-mentioned conversation: "I think Finnick deserved better. But I think he did the right thing. He's a good guy, sacrificing himself for the cause."
But of course, only to some extent. While yes, Finnick's death was unfair and he deserved better, that was the whole point of his tragic end. And after all, by that point the series had long established itself as fairly bloody, and the cast was stuck in the middle of a big war.