Tom Blyth is a British-born actor who recently graduated from Julliard. He’s starting his professional career as the star of an eight-episode EPIX biopic, Billy the Kid.
The real-life Billy was a notorious gun slinger from the 19th century. He was known under many aliases until his death in 1881 at the young age of 21.
Blyth’s approach to acting in this role is to use it as an opportunity to be a learning experience. To truly play this part, he studies the history of the real-life figure and finds ways to bring the character to life.
“I wasn’t proficient in any of those things before June of last year,” Blyth stated in an interview with the Boston Herald.
“It’s been a bit nuts in terms of expanding my horizons. In terms of learning new skills. I didn’t speak a lick of Spanish to be totally honest with you. And Billy did — he was fluent and it was a big part of his personality.
“So I had to do that and I went to set about taking lessons and learning as much as I could in about a month. As we were filming, rewrites were happening constantly, to refine and make it more specific.
“And I was noticing that I was getting a lot more Spanish every night,” which meant after a day’s filming Blyth had a lot of studying to do.
“They thought they could keep writing more because it was going so well. I learned,” he said with a laugh, “a lesson there about saying yes too easily.”