Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes' Rachel Zegler always pictured herself starring in this movie
Zegler read the book before she was a movie star, but she still made it a reality
With the SAG-AFTRA strike finally over, actors can get back to work acting and doing promotional stuff to promote their acting. Hunger Games prequel The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes had gotten an interim agreement in October, so its stars could’ve promoted it anyway, but they still decided to celebrate the end of the strike with a relatively brief press conference today featuring stars Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Hunter Schafer, and Josh Andrés Rivera.
Blyth, who is playing a young version of Donald Sutherland’s Coriolanus Snow before he becomes the evil dictator of the later stories, talked about how he consciously made an effort to avoid looking at Sutherland’s performance too much because he wanted to think of his Snow—nicknamed “Coryo,” because every name in this world must be a little silly—as a completely distinct character. He said that his goal with his performance was to make it so viewers could see three distinct versions of Snow: The boy he is at the beginning of this story, the man he becomes at the end, and then the tyrannical president, with (hopefully) a clear path between each one.
But the most interesting thing to come up during the press conference came when Zegler was asked about her level of Hunger Games fandom before making this movie. She said that she was a big fan the original books and movies, and she was so excited to discover that the protagonist of Suzanne Collins’ prequel book (Lucy Gray Baird) was a young woman with brown hair who loved to sing—just like her!—that she pictured herself starring in a hypothetical movie adaptation even when she first read it.
It may not be totally absurd for an actor to visualize themselves in a role like that, but in 2020 when that book came out Zegler basically didn’t have a movie career yet. She had filmed her role in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, but that movie wouldn’t come out for a few years, so she was calling her shot well in advance of it ever being a real possibility. That’s some impressive self-actualization.