Hunger Games’ McKenna Grace and Joseph Zada Give Exclusive Look at Sunrise on the Reaping

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The Capitol has always been good at making murder look pretty.

That contradiction is baked into the Hunger Games, in which children are sent to die, but first they get costumes, parades, interviews, constructed reality-TV storylines, and an audience trained to consume suffering with indifference. In Sunrise on the Reaping, that structure will be operating at full capacity. The world is brighter, grander, more colorful. Even the arena is resplendent…this makes the whole ordeal much, much worse to witness. 

For Joseph Zada and Mckenna Grace, filming the 50th Hunger Games (or: the second Quarter Quell) against beautiful, mountainous terrain on location in remote Spain was something closer to watching a horror movie take place in the daytime, like Midsommar, than a traditional YA fantasy. That deceptively chilling image gets to the heart of what makes the film’s story so messed up. There is no dark corridor obscuring the violence in this arena. Everybody can see it. The Capitol just makes sure you see it the way the Capitol wants you to.

More unsettling still, audiences already know where our hero Haymitch Abernathy ends up. Sunrise on the Reaping isn’t just about watching someone survive; it’s witnessing a hopeful, vibrant boy turn into the haunted, bitter old man Woody Harrelson introduced to us in the original films. 

Director Francis Lawrence calls Sunrise on the Reaping “by far the most emotional story that Suzanne Collins has written,” precisely because tragedy and hope are allowed to exist at the same time. That emotionality matters because young Haymitch is nothing like the man audiences first met in The Hunger Games. Producer Nina Jacobson describes original series hero Katniss Everdeen as “a much more stoic character” than Haymitch. Whereas Haymitch is “a heart on his sleeve boy,” Katniss survives partly by compartmentalizing. Haymitch arrives without that armor.

That is already a lot to ask of a young actor; luckily, Zada was hardly doing it all in a vacuum. In addition to the vast travelogue scale of the arena, Zada and Grace also found themselves surrounded by a ridiculous amount of acting firepower, including Jesse Plemons, Glenn Close, and Elle Fanning. The funny part is that neither actor knew just how stacked the ensemble would become when they signed on. 

Grace reveals that she discovered many of her castmates through The Hunger Games social accounts, at one point reacting, “Elle Fanning’s in our movie!” Zada similarly recalls watching the announcements roll out online day after day, remembering it as “a crazy way to find out you’re working with some of the best actors in the world.” For two young actors stepping into roles carrying enormous franchise baggage—with Zada especially tasked with making audiences believe this boy becomes Harrelson’s burned-out drinker—there is something poetic about Sunrise pairing its new generation with performers who already come with serious star power.

As Lawrence notes, we first encountered Haymitch as “a drunk, bitter, dissolute, and cynical man who appears to have thrown in the towel” a decade ago. Sunrise asks the obvious question: What did it take to turn that boy into that man? The answer is not just the games, but the entire system surrounding them.

Author Suzanne Collins has never been particularly subtle about the politics of Panem, nor should she be. Lawrence says Collins begins with questions about “the consequence of war and PTSD, and even propaganda,” but Sunrise pushes further than ever before for this franchise. “This time around,” Lawrence says, “Collins became interested in this idea of implicit submission,” asking why people simply accept being told what to do even when they are unhappy with those making the decisions.

That enigma changes how the Games function. Jacobson describes the Games as a manufactured product, pointing to the hidden hand that shapes what audiences see in order to keep people in their place. It’s a product designed to tell people they have no power to take on the Capitol. Even Haymitch himself becomes complacent.

“You’re not necessarily seeing what really happened,” Lawrence adds. And he’s right. The Capitol shows people what it wants them to see, not the way things are. They create a carefully crafted narrative for Haymitch in the new movie, but nothing about it is based on his life in District 12 or who he is as a person. It is not enough to control someone’s body; the Capitol wants ownership over the story of what happens to that body afterward. Hence even the clothing becomes part of the cruelty.

Grace and Zada note that the tributes’ 1970s-inspired costumes are their own form of torture: tight pants, capes, pristine white outfits, and Doc Martens, all while these kids are preparing to fight to the death. Grace sums up the absurdity perfectly: “I feel like it’s very President Snow and very Capitol how impractical those costumes are, and just like, the ridiculousness of it to send out all of these kids in these pristine white outfits.” It is funny until you think about what she is actually describing. These children are being dressed for somebody else’s entertainment. Literal human sacrifices to an elite’s passing distraction.

Lawrence wanted the physical suffering underneath all that pageantry to remain visible. Zada remembers that whenever the cast performed a stunt sequence, the director would sometimes have them do the entire sequence again even if production only needed a small piece of footage, forcing them to carry the characters’ exhaustion into the shot.

“It felt like a punishment at the time,” Lawrence says, “but you watch it, and it looks incredible.” That distinction between looking incredible and feeling terrible might as well be the Capitol’s mission statement. The thing is, Sunrise on the Reaping is not interested in suffering for suffering’s sake. Its larger argument is about what happens when resistance fails to produce immediate gratification. That may be where Haymitch differs most significantly from Katniss. She eventually gets to lead a revolution;  Haymitch doesn’t.

Jacobson describes resistance as something where participants may make “profound sacrifices” without ever knowing whether anything changed. The point, she argues, is that resistance itself sets an example that, eventually, somebody else will follow and respark. It inspires the next era of resisting, until circumstances finally allow that resistance to threaten the status quo.

The young cast reached almost the exact same conclusion. Zada says he hopes audiences understand that “change takes longer than that a lot of the time and not to give up.” Grace takes the idea even further, pointing directly toward the franchise’s future. “Standing up for what you believe in may not reward you immediately,” she says, but “you may be paving a way for somebody later down the line.”

That is Haymitch’s tragedy, and maybe his victory? He does not get to be the Mockingjay. He does not get the posters or the armies. He gets absorbed by the Capitol system he fought to survive and then perpetuated for decades. Yet somewhere underneath it all, something survived. Katniss becomes the face of resistance. Something she wouldn’t have been able to do without Haymitch.

Haymitch belongs to the generation that had to keep the damn thing alive long enough for her to exist. Sunrise on the Reaping is the story of what that kind of survival actually costs when you are the one forced to carry the spark before anyone knows it will become a fire.

The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is in theaters on Nov. 20.