Tom Blyth may have starred in Francis Lawrence’s box office hit “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” but that doesn’t mean the British actor is moving on from independent film.

Case in point: “Plainclothes.” In writer-director Carmen Emmi’s feature debut, Blyth stars as Lucas, an undercover cop in 1990s Syracuse, N.Y., who falls in love with Andrew (Russell Tovey), one of his targets in a sting operation going after gay men for public indecency in a mall bathroom.

“There is just something really refreshing about the scrappiness of a smaller film like [“Plainclothes”],” Blyth tells me during a Zoom video interview for this week’s “Just for Variety” podcast from Senegal, where he is shooting Claire Denis’ “The Cry of the Guards.” “I’ve done a bunch of them this year and last year. I’ve gone back to that kind of on purpose.