The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping casts Katniss Everdeen's parents
The upcoming prequel movie has added Scot Greenan and Grace Ackary as Burdock Everdeen and Asterid March, respectively - the father and mother of Jennifer Lawrence's iconic heroine from the original Hunger Games films.
It has also been announced that Melody Chikakane Brown and Jefferson White have joined The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping as Hattie Meeney and Mr. McCoy, respectively.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will feature Joseph Zada in the lead role of Haymitch Abernathy - the character previously played by Woody Harrelson in the original tetralogy - while Whitney Peak has been cast as his girlfriend, Lenore Dove Baird.
Maya Hawke will take on the role of Wiress, the former Hunger Games victor who now mentors the tributes of District 12, while Mckenna Grace will portray District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner.
Jesse Plemons, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and Karate Kid: Legends star Ben Wang have also joined the cast as Plutarch Heavensbee, Beetee Latier, and District 12 tribute Wyatt Callow, respectively.
Glenn Close has signed on to play Drusilla Sickle, the cruel escort to the tributes of District 12, while Billy Porter has been cast as her estranged husband Magno Stift, who serves as the contestants' uninspired designer.
Kieran Culkin is set to appear in the movie as Caesar Flickerman - the character first played by Stanley Tucci in the original Hunger Games films - and Elle Fanning has signed on to play Effie Trinket, previously portrayed by Elizabeth Banks.
Rounding out the ensemble is Ralph Fiennes, who will step into the role of President Coriolanus Snow, previously played by the late Donald Sutherland in the original movies and by Tom Blyth in the 2023 prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping is based on Suzanne Collins' 2025 novel of the same name, and serves as the second instalment in her Hunger Games prequel trilogy.
Taking place 24 years before the events of The Hunger Games, the story follows 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy as he is forced to compete in the ruthless 50th Hunger Games, where the number of tributes - and the bloodshed - is doubled.
As Haymitch struggles to stay alive, he begins to uncover the Capitol's darkest secrets and learns the devastating cost of rebellion.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping - which is slated to hit cinemas on November 20, 2026 - is being directed by Francis Lawrence, who will be working from a script written by Billy Ray.
The movie is being produced by Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson of Color Force, with Cameron MacConomy serving as executive producer.
Following the announcement that Zada and Peak would lead The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Lionsgate Motion Picture Group Co-President Erin Westerman said: 'The Hunger Games franchise has long been a launching pad for remarkable young actors, and Jo and Whitney carry that legacy forward with incredible heart, depth, and fire.
'After auditioning hundreds of gifted performers from around the world, these two stood out - not just for their talent, but for the emotional truth they brought to these iconic roles.
'Haymitch has always been a fan favourite, and his origin story is one of the most anticipated in the franchise. His relationship with Lenore Dove is deeply woven into the emotional history of Panem.
'We can't wait for fans to experience the story that shaped one of the most compelling characters in the series.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Perth Now
3 days ago
- Perth Now
Sam Claflin battled body dysmorphia
Sam Claflin suffered a form of body dysmorphia because of the "pressure" he felt to achieve the perfect Hollywood physique. The Hunger Games star admits he never saw himself as a "leading man" when he embarked on an acting career and he felt like he had to go to extremes to get in shape to fit in among his peers. He told The Telegraph newspaper: "I was always really short until I was 18, so I never thought of myself in any way as a leading man ... "I assumed I'd become a character actor. When I was cast in Pirates [Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides], I thought: 'What on earth am I doing here?' ... "There is this Hollywood assumption that it's the men with the six packs who sell the movie. So there was a pressure that that was what I needed to look like. "As a result, I developed a form of body dysmorphia. It wasn't quite an eating disorder, and I'm not blaming anyone but myself, but it was definitely because of the industry I'm in." Sam went on to insist he's become much better at talking about his feelings as he's grown up and he eventually realised he wanted to prioritise having a family over his Hollywood career. The actor - who has two children with his ex-wife Laura Haddock - added: "We're men and we are not allowed to talk about our feelings. "But I've got much better. These days, I'm definitely not afraid of speaking about how I feel. And I also realised I didn't want a career in Hollywood. I wanted to come home and become a dad." Sam previously admitted he pushed himself too far in a "desperate" to be nominated for an Oscar. He told GQ Hype: 'I went through a stage of desperately vying for an Oscar but doing things that were really not me. Physically, emotionally transforming myself. "[2018 film The Nightingale] was too far the other way. I think that was the turning point in my life. I don't think I could do that again.' However, Sam realised his acting career and vying for awards masked deeper issues. He said: 'One of the reasons I became an actor is that I always want people to like me. I think it's only recently dawned on me that I try so hard to make other people happy that I don't know who I am. "I'm from Norfolk [in the UK] but I've just adopted an accent that no one can really put a flag on. It's an amalgamation of other people's accents. Over time I'd sort of lost, I don't know … What makes me happy?"
ABC News
30-07-2025
- ABC News
Why Donald Trump, Elon Musk and JD Vance want to 'Make America procreate again' through pronatalism
Simone Collins is making pizza, sourdough and banana bread while juggling a toddler on her back when a fight breaks out between two of her three older children that inevitably ends in tears. "Every night is the Hunger Games," she jokes. "Every night is chaos, battle royale, flat-out disaster zone." With four kids under six and a fifth on the way, you'd think her and husband Malcolm Collins just love children but Malcolm says it's not really about that at all. "Kids do not exist for our pleasure, right? If you want that, get a pet. Kids, we have to pay to the future the debt we owe the past," he says. The Collinses — who ultimately want at least seven children and preferably up to 12 — have become the poster couple for the pronatalist movement, which promotes having more babies to address falling birth rates. Malcolm believes it is an existential issue that could have an impact on the future of the human race. "Our greatest threat is fertility collapse," he says, while his youngest daughter Industry Americus squirms in his lap. "If fertility collapse does lead to a collapse of human civilisation, eventually all of life dies, because humans are the only life form on this planet that can take life to the stars before the sun eventually and inevitably consumes our planet." Pronatalism is a cause they believe is so grave that Simone is prepared to die for it. After complications with her first birth, she's getting ready to have her fifth C-section, a potentially life-threatening procedure. "Before I met Malcolm, I would do things like base jumping and skydiving, and that also was a pretty risky thing to do, but it didn't make the world a better place or create a new life," she says. The former Silicon Valley couple use their tech connections to grow their family, testing and selecting embryos based on intelligence and future health to have not just a big family, but an optimal one. That's drawn accusations of eugenics, which Malcolm strenuously denies. "When we do polygenic selection or gene modification, everyone's like, 'Oh, people are going to use that to get rid of groups that are seen as disabled, like autistic people'," he says. "And it's like 'bro, my wife is autistic, my two older kids are autistic and we could have selected against it, and we didn't'. "Because with polygenics, rather than the government deciding what are good genes and bad genes, the people who experience those genes get to decide." The couple admits they deliberately troll the left, with controversial statements and Simone's outfit of choice — a pilgrim-style dress topped off with a bonnet and Handmaid's Tale hat. "It's funny because the only way we can avoid a Handmaid's Tale future, is for feminists to have more kids," she says. "Our primary means of raising awareness about demographic collapse has involved making people angry, making people outraged, because that's the only way they're gonna take this issue seriously. "We don't care if we become the punching bags of the movement, if at least people are aware of the fact that this is a major issue." But their willingness to become human clickbait for the cause has taken a toll, with death threats and doxxing a semi-regular occurrence. Simone proudly shows off an AR-15 assault rifle and Beretta mounted on the walls of their 18th century home, in part to protect against the growing threats they face. "We have guns for the death threats but also we have guns because we love guns," she says. The pronatalist movement is spearheaded by someone even more polarising and controversial than the Collinses — billionaire Elon Musk. Fox News asked him what was the biggest thing that keeps him up at night in March. "The birth rate is very low in almost every country and unless that changes, civilisation will disappear," Mr Musk said. Earlier this year — when the father of 14 brought his four-year-old son to a White House meeting with US President Donald Trump — Mr Musk's nose-picking, face-pulling child stole the show. The number of progeny Mr Musk has produced is a source of pride for him. "You've got to walk the talk, so I do have a lot of kids and I encourage others to have lots of kids," he said in 2024. Even though the two men have since spectacularly fallen out, pronatalism is having a moment under the Trump administration. Mr Trump has declared himself the 'fertilisation president', vowing to make IVF more accessible. When campaigning for the presidency, he declared: "I want a baby boom. Oh, you men are so lucky out there, you're so lucky." Earlier this year Vice-president JD Vance told a crowd, "Let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America." Mr Trump's recently passed Big Beautiful Bill included a $US1,000 baby bonus and the Trump administration is reportedly considering several other measures to encourage a baby boom. They include a 'motherhood medal' for women with six or more children and government-funded programs to teach women about their menstrual cycles, so they can work out when they're ovulating and try to conceive. Experts like Associate Professor Catherine Pakaluk from the Catholic University of America are sceptical those measures will make any difference. "I think a fair reading of all of the countries that have looked at this problem squarely, including Australia, is that you can get a little bit of lift by sending out cash to people — baby bonuses, tax credits, subsidies — but that lift in the birthrate seems to be mostly temporary and short-lived," she says. The researcher and author also has a deeply personal connection to the issue — as the mother of eight children herself. Unlike the Collinses, her Catholic faith played a big part in her decision to have a big family and she believes it's religious communities who may hold the key to boosting birthrates. "If you want to encourage child-bearing, have a hard look at the way in which your policies affect or don't affect living church communities," she says. The movement has seen an unlikely convergence of trad (traditional) wives and tech bros — religious groups who oppose things like IVF and abortion and tech advocates like the Collinses, calling for genetic selection, surrogacy and artificial wombs to grow their families. "At the end of the day, the traditional family form folks are not going to be able to get in bed, proverbially, with the tech-genetic-selection-surrogate birth situation," Ms Pakaluk says. "So I don't know what it spells about the future, but I don't expect there to be tight alliances between these really deeply intellectually different positions." Other experts are sceptical that population collapse is even a legitimate concern. Demographer Philip Cohen from the University of Maryland doesn't believe population decline is a real risk for the US or other developed societies, but that aging populations are. "As birth rates fall, the number of old people in society increases and that's expensive," Dr Cohen says. "We have to address that, but what we don't need to be worrying about is population decline as something that must be fixed by more births now or else we're going to be in trouble. "That's just not the case. "At some point in the future, if birth rates don't rise, our populations would decline if we don't reinforce them with immigration, which of course is something we can do if we want to." He believes there are a number of factors behind the current pronatalist push and why its proponents are reluctant to embrace immigration as a solution. "On the political right, the motivations are a combination of nationalism — 'if we don't breed faster, our competitors will outbreed us'," he says of the mentality. "[There is a] sort of a chauvinism or racism, that is a certain kind of people — the wrong kind of people — are having all the children these days so we will be replaced by new populations of people who have higher birth rates, people who aren't as good or desirable for some basically racist reason. "And then there's also a gender component, which is sort of a nostalgia for a patriarchal past." Simone Collins disputes that there's an element of racism within the movement. "There are racist groups that call themselves pronatalists, but they're not, they're white nationalists," she says. "A pronatalist just believes that the future is bright, humanity is good, and everyone should, if they want to, have children." She argues the movement is actually about preserving diversity, not just Western cultures. "A lot of ethnicities, groups, cultures are going go extinct because they're reproducing below repopulation rate," Simone says. When asked why Australians should care about the pronatalist movement, Malcolm Collins is clear. "We will replace you," he says. "The game of who wins human civilisation has entirely changed. Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV Do you know more about this story? Get in touch with 7.30 here.
Perth Now
29-07-2025
- Perth Now
‘She's broken in many ways': Elle Fanning teases her Predator: Badlands character
Elle Fanning has teased her character Thia will be the Predator Dek's 'little companion' in Predator: Badlands. The 27-year-old actress portrays the synthetic - a biomechanical humanoid - opposite Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi's Yautja hunter Dek in the upcoming action movie, and Fanning has now given fans some clues as to what to expect out of her character in Predator: Badlands. Speaking with Screen Rant, Fanning said of Dek: 'He's speaking another language, and Thia is there to guide him in a lot of ways, and to be his buddy. 'But I think she's also wanting respect, as well. I think Dek wants respect in the film from other things you'll figure out, and Thia also wants her respect also from Dek, in some ways. 'So, she is his little companion, his little buddy, and I love she has a different personality than any other synthetic we've seen before in any of the films.' The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping star added it was 'nice' to collaborate with director Dan Trachtenberg in fleshing out Thia, and teased the 'friendship' that develops between her character and Dek. She continued: 'It was nice to work with Dan to kind of mould that personality, and almost more of a positive attitude. 'But I love the friendship between the two, because as you see, Thia is broken in many ways, and Dek is kind of the runt of his clan. So, it's a little bit of these two misfits coming together.' Predator: Badlands follows the young hunter Dek (Schuster-Koloamatangi) after he has been outcast from his clan and sent to a remote planet where he forms an unlikely alliance with Thia (Fanning) as the pair search for the ultimate adversary. Trachtenberg previously said Dek - who will be the first Yautja protagonist in a Predator movie instead of the antagonist - was inspired by action icons like Mad Max and Conan the Barbarian. The filmmaker told Empire magazine: 'He's a thing of few words, pretty blunt. He cuts straight to the point. Literally and figuratively.' Trachtenberg added Dek was viewed as the 'runt of the litter' among his clan, and the director wanted audiences to root for the character. He explained: 'That feels like a big idea, not just within Predator, but in sci-fi generally. 'In most sci-fi universes, the 'creatures' are either bad guys or sidekicks. In [Predator: Badlands] it's, 'What if you were with the creature on this crazy mission to prove itself, seeing everything through its eyes?'' Trachtenberg had also teased he has taken a 'big, crazy swing' with Predator: Badlands - which will land in cinemas on November 7, 2025. The moviemaker told Bloody Disgusting: 'It's a big, crazy swing, and I think that's what drives butts into seats. 'If you want the same old Predator experience, you can hit play on Predator or Prey or any other, whichever one is your fit.'
