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MOVIE FEATURE

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Director Francis Lawrence returns to the dystopian universe ofThe Hunger Games for the fourth time with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes , the prequel story based on Suzanne Collins’ best-selling novel. Words Gill Pringle

S et 64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as Tribute – and decades before Coriolanus Snow would become the tyrannical President of Panem – this new adventure follows Tom Blyth’s young Coriolanus, the last hope for the once proud Snow family who have fallen from grace in a post-war Capitol. With his livelihood threatened, Snow reluctantly accepts an assignment to mentor Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird – a Tribute with the voice of a songbird, from the impoverished District 12 – in the tenth Hunger Games. After her breakout performance in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story , Zegler was the

only choice for the filmmakers, especially given how easily she could bring Lucy Gray’s extraordinary singing talents to life. The big question was: Who to cast as young Coriolanus Snow? It had to be an actor who could share a real chemistry with Zegler’s Lucy Gray, while also conveying a hidden undercurrent of malevolence. ”I was completely taken by surprise by Tom,” says director Francis Lawrence, of the British actor best known for his starring role on TV series Billy the Kid .

”We had seen a lot of people, and I think we thought we were probably going to go with somebody that was an unknown. But Tom’s audition came in very late, and sort of blew everybody out of the water,” he says. ”I was not familiar with his work, or anything that he’d done before. So he came as a big surprise to me, but I just fell in love with him as an actor – and with his big blue eyes, I could see facial feature-wise, and physically, how he could become an elder Donald Sutherland,” the director continues.

Director Francis Lawrence was a cameraman on Pump Up the Volume (1990). DYK?

FEBRUARY 2024

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