The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes us back in time to an earlier era of Panem, where a younger Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) forms a powerful bond with the tribute he mentors in the Hunger Games: Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler).
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One of the biggest novelties that comes with A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is that Lucy is very different from Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). True to the title Lucy is a “songbird,” who is already a skilled singer and performer when she’s chosen as tribute for District 12 in the 10th annual Hunger Games. The character requires Rachel Zegler to show off as much of the musical performance skill she showed with her debut performance in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story as the action movie skills she demonstrated in DC’s Shazam 2.
ComicBook.com was at the virtual press event for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, where Rachel Zegler revealed that it was actually her idea to take on the added challenge of doing live performances of Lucy’s musical numbers while filming:
“Yeah, I mean, it was kind of my choice to sing live on set,” Zegler told reporters. “I had done it before on my first film [West Side Story], and I feel really confident in that sphere of performance in general. That was what I kind of came out of the womb doing on stage, so getting to do that for my peers and on set for my crew and the creative team was something really special that I felt like I could bring to the table. When you’re working on sets like that or when you’re even watching movies, it kind of takes you out of the world when all of a sudden somebody starts lip-syncing and it just kind of takes you out of it.
So I felt really blessed that Francis [Lawrence] and Nina [Jacobson] trusted me to do that and getting to bring that into the acoustics of The Hob or the stage at The Reaping – and all of the other places I don’t want to spoil – that Lucy Gray gets to sing,” Zegler continued. “It just adds a completely different tone to the scenes and I felt like it was really, really important not only to me, but also to the character that I would be doing a disservice if I didn’t perform live every take. And it was a lot and it was very strenuous, but I trained to do it and I felt really, really confident with the outcome and I hope audiences do too.”
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds of Snakes is in theaters this week. The soundtrack is also available
