Sam Claflin, the 29-year old Brit best known as Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games, will break your heart this summer. Playing Will Traynor in the highly-anticipated adaptation of Jojo Moyes’ best-selling novel Me Before You (in theaters Friday), the actor is at once handsome and charismatic, sullen and seething, as a man who used to have it all but, due to a spinal-cord injury, is now confined to a wheelchair.

Getting inside that head, and body, was no easy feat. “It was trying to explore a character that I have absolutely no similarities with,” Claflin says. “As you can imagine, limiting my gestures to eye movements and mouth movements was quite difficult. I’m quite an open, flamboyant character myself.”

To replicate a quadriplegic physicality, Claflin held his body in a very specific position, at times tying his hands behind his back to become familiar with the limited movement. He lived for months with soreness in his neck, shoulders, lower back, and fingers. He also dropped close to 40 pounds over the course of production to represent Traynor’s muscular atrophy.

Despite those hurdles, Claflin, who himself dreamed of a professional soccer career before an ankle injury sidelined him, never loses the desirability that makes his caregiver, Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke), fall in love with him. “I tried to be as witty as possible,” Claflin says. “If that comes across, I think it just proves that Emilia is so good that she can act in love. It was really kind of out of my hands.”

What was in his hands was understanding Traynor, a man who is grappling with whether or not to end his life. Director Thea Sharrock says it was Claflin’s innate empathy that led her to cast him. “Sam is unlike a lot of actors of his generation,” she says. “He has a humbleness that is very pure and real. The first time I met him, I felt straight away that this was someone who was really trying to tell me what he thought of Will, the character, not just trying to sell that he could do it well.” That was just an added bonus.

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NEW YORK — Me Before You has something most weepy romances don’t: laughs.

Writing the film version of her 2012 novel, “it was important to keep the humor going as much as the sadder elements,” author Jojo Moyes says. The fun continued after the cameras stopped rolling, say stars Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke, who play a paralyzed man and his affable caretaker in the drama (in theaters Friday). Some of the charismatic duo’s funniest (and most painful) on-set stories:

Using a wheelchair proved more difficult than walking. To play the quadriplegic Will, Claflin practiced using a motorized wheelchair for two months. That meant “getting used to going from Point A to B, what speed I had to go at certain moments — it’s not as easy as you’d imagine,” he says. Claflin suffered only minor scrapes on his hands (from going through doorways) and never fell out of the chair, even when shooting a scene in which Louisa (Clarke) sits on his lap as they race down a dirt road at nearly 13 miles per hour. “That was the quickest I ever got it. No seat belt,” Claflin says. Clarke adds: “Yeah, you were holding me on so bad.”

Love hurts — and not just emotionally. Clarke fractured her hip midway through the shoot. That made the film’s tear-jerking climax even more difficult, as Lou dances on the beach before Will makes a startling confession. “It was super-hard anyway, from an acting point of view, because it was the most raw that we get. Then I was in so much pain,” Clarke says. Even sitting on Claflin’s lap was an almost-Olympian feat. “They had to build a little obstacle course for me,” she says. “They got all these boxes and tried to move them so I could look like I was getting on” his chair.
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