Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games: Actor, Films and Story

Finnick Odair is a former Hunger Games victor who first appears in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, directed by Francis Lawrence and released in the US on November 22, 2013. Sam Claflin plays him in all three of his films, billed 13th in Catching Fire and 12th in both Mockingjay films.

He arrives at the point where the series changes shape. President Snow announces the 75th Hunger Games as a Quarter Quell, with tributes drawn from the pool of past victors, which is how a celebrated winner ends up in the same arena as Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. That is the answer to why a character who arrives this late matters so much: the story needed victors, and he is one of them.

He is not in the leading cast of The Hunger Games (2012), nor of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a prequel set more than sixty years before the original Games. For the wider ensemble, see the Hunger Games characters index and the Hunger Games cast list.

Finnick's closest tie in the films is to Mags, and his other bonds form around the shared goal of getting Katniss and Peeta through the arena and then the war.

Mags Flanagan, played by Lynn Cohen, teams up with Katniss and Peeta in the Quarter Quell arena alongside him. She gives up her life so he can save Peeta, and in my opinion that sacrifice is the reason his protection of Peeta carries weight in the later films. His link to Katniss Everdeen is a working alliance: they fight on the same side in the arena, wake together in the hovercraft, and end up in the same unit in Mockingjay Part 2. Peeta Mellark is the person Finnick saves in the arena, and in Part 2 he is among the squad when Peeta relapses and attacks Katniss.

Among the other victors, Beetee Latier and Johanna Mason join the arena group, and Haymitch Abernathy and Plutarch Heavensbee are with Finnick when the hovercraft reaches safety. Gale Hawthorne is the fourth member of Katniss's unit in the Capitol push. Read more on Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Gale Hawthorne and Haymitch.

In my opinion, Finnick's best moment is the arena sequence in Catching Fire where the District 6 victor is killed shielding Peeta from the mutated mandrills and Mags gives up her life so that Finnick can save him. It shows the cost of that choice and puts Finnick's actions at the center of it. It could be argued that the sequence does more to establish him than any introduction, since the film trusts what he does to explain who he is.

Second, I would pick the hovercraft waking scene. Katniss wakes with Haymitch, Finnick, Beetee and Plutarch, learns the arena's destruction was a planned rescue, and attacks Haymitch in anger. Paradoxically, a scene built around her anger is also where the rebellion's survivors are first gathered in one place, and Finnick is among them.

Third comes the sewer descent in Mockingjay Part 2. Compared with the tar flood and the Leeg sisters' stand, it is perhaps the film's most closed in set piece, and Finnick's death there gives it weight beyond the creature design. That being said, Mockingjay Part 1 puts him less in the foreground, so his reputation rests mostly on Catching Fire and the last stretch of Part 2. If you are new to the series and want to see why people care about him, start with Catching Fire, and use hunger games movies in order to plan the rest.