Ready to move again to Panem? Eight years after the final instalment graced the massive display screen – Mockingjay, Part Two in 2015 – a model new The Hunger Games film is on the way in which. This one relies on Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel, The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes, which is about over 60 years earlier than Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute, and entered the world to battle for her life. This new story focuses on the dictator who was implementing these brutal Hunger Games, President Coriolanus Snow (performed beforehand by Donald Sutherland, and now by Tom Blyth), again when he was a young man within the Capitol.
The franchise, each in guide and film kind, was an enormous success, however returning director Francis Lawrence (who helmed sequels Catching Fire and each _Mockingjay_s) nonetheless had a giant concern on the entrance of his thoughts going into making the prequel. “Will people go see a new Hunger Games movie without Katniss?” he asks Empire, chatting with us solely for our model new Dune: Part Two subject. It’s query, however one the brand new movie has a solution for. Enter Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird, a tribute from District 12 chosen to compete within the tenth annual Hunger Games, and to whom young Snow is assigned as a mentor. She is the ‘anti-Katniss’, as Lawrence places it. “Katniss was an introvert and a survivor,” he says. “She was quite quiet and stoic, you could almost say [she was] asexual. Lucy Gray is the opposite. She wears her sexuality on her sleeve, [and] she really is
a performer.”
Where Katniss was a reluctant face of the rise up, who needed to be compelled to placed on a smile on digital camera, and preserve her fake-turned-real love story with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) convincing in order to get the general public on her facet, Lucy Gray relishes the highlight. Where Katniss was lethal with a bow, Lucy Gray makes use of her wiles as a weapon. “She loves crowds,” says Lawrence. “She knows how to play crowds and manipulate people.” May the percentages be ever in her favour.
Read Empire’s unique The Hunger Games story, chatting with director Francis Lawrence, in full within the new Dune: Part Two subject, on sale Thursday 31 August. Pre-order a print copy of Cover 1 or Cover 2, or turn out to be an Empire member to access the digital version on launch day. The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes is in cinemas from 17 November.
