Three years ago, new cinematic life was found in a “Hunger Games” adventure without Katniss. Now, the franchise is back, jumping through time again to check in on another major character from the original films in his teenage years: Haymitch Abernathy.
Before he became the cynical, hard-drinking mentor to Katniss and Peeta, memorably portrayed by Woody Harrelson, Haymitch was just another tribute from District 12 trying to survive the brutal games, literally and spiritually.
The franchise has never had a problem enlisting top-tier talent to play the Capitol’s ruling class, and in “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” in theaters Nov. 20, many get to put their stamp on younger versions of established characters: Ralph Fiennes is President Snow, Jesse Plemons is Plutarch Heavensbee, Elle Fanning is Effie Trinket and Kieran Culkin is Caesar Flickerman.
But if director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson have learned anything over their years of making “Hunger Games” movies, it’s that it is the young cast members who make them come alive. And here they had to find not just a new talent who could lead a major blockbuster, but someone who could believably be a teenage version of the character Harrelson helped create.
“It’s big shoes to fill, right?” Lawrence says.
Thousands of young men put themselves on tape for the chance to play Haymitch, and the answer arrived in a then-19-year-old Australian named Joseph Zada. With parents in the industry and a growing resume, Zada was already on the verge of breaking out: He’d been cast in Netflix’s “East of Eden” as Cal Trask, the role James Dean once played, and was nearing the end of that shoot when the “Hunger Games” audition came in.
In Zada, the filmmakers saw the charisma, the range and, importantly, the mischief they were looking for.
“Inherent in this character is this mischief,” Jacobson says. “And that’s a quality that you kind of have or you don’t.”
Zada, now 21, says he wanted to start far away from Harrelson’s Haymitch and then make it his job “to bridge that gap throughout the course of filming.”
But the shooting schedule didn’t make that easy on him. As with many major blockbusters, things were not shot in order, and the temporal whiplash was sometimes downright absurd. Zada and Whitney Peak, who plays his girlfriend, Lenore Dove, essentially shot the first and last scenes of the film back-to-back, and they didn’t know which would come first until the last minute.
This, Zada says, “freaked me out so much.” Thankfully, he says, they filmed their opening scene first.
His performance has the veteran actors singing his praises, too.
“I was like, this guy’s going to be all right, like, ’cause you know he’s professional, he’s very kind, he’s prepared,” says Culkin. “And then when I saw the film … I went ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know just how good he was. I told him last night after I saw the movie I was, like, ‘You’re going to be around a while.’ I said, ‘I wish you luck, but you don’t need it.’”
Fitting for a movie in which the Games level up with twice as many tributes as usual, the production took on an epic scale, spanning some five months and bringing the primary cast from Spain to Germany, where they filmed in many real locations. For Zada and Mckenna Grace, who plays District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner (and her twin sister), filming the games was as grueling as you might expect, with six-day work weeks and intense physical sequences.
“It was mental,” Zada says. “I think the hardest part was getting onto set and feeling so fresh and new, and then having young actors look to you to set the pace and the tone. I was like, ‘Don’t look at me, look at someone else!’”
Some of the challenges were more internal. Grace was pretty nervous about a certain heated confrontation with Glenn Close’s character, Drusilla Sickle: She was supposed to slap the legendary actor and she was spiraling about it.
“I had this whole, like, scenario made up in my mind where I was frightened that Glenn would ask me to go method. I was like, ‘I morally cannot hit Glenn Close,’” Grace says.
Close did not ultimately ask her to go method, and Grace, hopped up on espresso, did her best stage combat.
“It was exciting, and Glenn was just incredible and such a terrifying — and also amazing — scene partner to have,” Grace says.
Zada was barely 7 years old when the first “Hunger Games” film arrived. Like many of his castmates, he grew up watching the original trilogy. Ben Wang, who plays District 12 tribute Wyatt Callow, says the movies and Suzanne Collins’ books had a “chokehold” on his middle school years.
“I went to so many themed parties,” Wang says. “I cut so many birthday cakes with the Mockingjay logo icing on it.”
The cultural impact of the series is hard to overstate: The novels have sold over 100 million copies. The movies have grossed over $3.3 billion. The last film, “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” might not have reached the box office heights of the original series, but it still made over $347 million worldwide.
“It’s a rare franchise and a rare book series because you know it has such a wide appeal. It’s so beloved and, you know, you know a lot of people are going to see it,” Plemons says. “But there’s so much substance and so much, you know, social relevance.”
This film also sees the return of Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson, who appear in the epilogue. Their involvement was kept secret as long as possible, but the cat (or the Katniss) is officially out of the bag.
“We challenged ourselves throughout the script process to make a movie that would work if they couldn’t do it or didn’t do it,” Jacobson says. “It was obviously thrilling and emotional that they did want to come back.”
Whether or not the series will continue after “Sunrise on the Reaping” is in Collins’ hands. The filmmakers were pretty certain they’d said farewell to the series after “Mockingjay.” They also didn’t know she was working on another one while they were making “Ballad.” Francis Lawrence has come to appreciate the fun of the unknown, though. Collins isn’t writing for stakeholders or fan service: She’s just writing what she wants.
“This could be the end, or there could be something happening in the world that’s inspiring her or will inspire her,” Lawrence says. “I mean, we could get a call in six weeks or it could be five years.”
Jacobson adds: “There’s something really kind of beautiful and, like, almost a little bit romantic for us about the fact that, like, we just are here if she does.”
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AP journalist Martina Inchingolo contributed reporting from London.
