How Rachel Zegler Became Lucy Gray Baird in 'The Hunger Games'

Teen Vogue

"There's a line that Lucy Gray says: 'I don't sing when I'm told, I sing when I have something to say.' We get to make our voices heard in a way that's meaningful, then you've done your job as a person." Rachel Zegler grew up watching Katniss Everdeen in 'The Hunger Games' trilogy, but it all came full circle when she got the call offering for her to play the role of Lucy Gray Baird in 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.' Rachel breaks down her entire process for the film, from going to Poland to shoot the movie, taking on dialect lessons, the unique costumes she got to wear and so much more.    THE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS &amp; SNAKES is now available on Premium Video on Demand from Lionsgate®, just in time for the holidays.  Director: Madison Coffey Director of Photography: Jack Belisle Talent: Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Josh Andres Rivera Producer: Madison Coffey Line Producer: Romeeka Powell Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez Production Manager: Kayla Rodriguez Production Coordinator: Tanía Jones Talent Booker: Meredith Judkins Cam Op: Chloe Ramos Gaffer: David Djaco Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen PA: Griffin Garnett

Transcript

00:00 There's a line that Lucy Gray says, "I don't sing when I'm told, I sing when I have something to say."

00:05 I think it's a very powerful line. I carry it with me that we get to make our voices heard

00:11 in a way that is meaningful. Then you've done your job as a person, for me as an actor,

00:16 as a public figure. And I think that's a really beautiful thing about Lucy Gray,

00:20 and I didn't necessarily realize it until that scene and that line.

00:24 Hi, my name is Rachel Zegler, and this is how I became Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games,

00:29 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

00:30 I was a huge Hunger Games fan. I think the first movie came out when I was 10 or 11.

00:44 I remember seeing the trilogy of books at my Scholastic Book Fair, and I just fell in love

00:50 with the characters, with the story. Katniss was such a compelling character to me. I read

00:55 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2020, and I fell in love with Lucy Gray. I thought it was

01:00 such a fun idea for a character, that the musical aspect was so interesting.

01:05 My agent called me when I was living in London working on another job,

01:08 and he said that Francis Lawrence really wanted to meet with me about playing Lucy Gray. And he

01:13 offered me the part. He said that they were going to be shooting in Poland and in Germany,

01:18 and the idea of being away from home for a whole year was really, really terrifying to me.

01:22 So I initially turned him down. And then I sang at the Grammys that year,

01:26 and I was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and I stumbled upon The Hunger Games exhibition,

01:32 and I felt this faux mo in my heart that I was going to miss out on doing something really

01:37 special. Things came together a few months after that, and here we are.

01:41 Lucy Gray is an incredibly mercurial character. You never really know what roll of the dice

01:51 you're going to get. I think her intentions are unclear, which unnerves Coriolanus throughout

01:56 the entirety of our story. She always seems to have something up her sleeve. Once you embrace

02:02 the fact that you never know what you're going to get, you kind of free yourself in your performance

02:06 a lot. There's obviously very meticulous details that we tried to keep from the book, but then

02:12 there are moments that are ad-libbed in our film. The while in her eyes, that was all conversations

02:18 that I had with Frances, conversations I had with Tom in the scenes that you have together. You just

02:23 want to make it seem as book-accurate as you can, because that's what fans really care about.

02:28 I knew that I was rooting for Lucy Gray in the book when she's referred to as the "runt girl"

02:33 from District 12. We know how that goes. Not necessarily by Katniss being the "runt girl,"

02:38 because she wasn't. She was a volunteer. It's almost as if Prim had actually gone into the

02:43 games, because Primrose Everdeen was the "runt girl" from District 12. I was immediately drawn

02:48 to this "what if" scenario. What if it actually was somebody that nobody believed in? People really

02:54 believed in Katniss because she showed a fiery strength the second she volunteered for her sister.

02:59 Everybody is doubting Lucy Gray from the second she steps up there. She also knows that her name

03:04 is being picked. She's aware that the mayor's daughter is jealous of her and has her father

03:08 call her name. I think Sejanus also says it in the book. It was probably rigged. Her name wasn't

03:14 actually on that slip, because she's all made up. She's wearing her favorite dress. She's going to

03:18 give them a show, whether they like it or not. A lot of the preparation was happening while I

03:23 wasn't available. I missed a lot of the stunt training and the stunt choreography. My day one,

03:28 I landed in Wroclaw, Poland. I went to Centennial Hall, where we shot the games themselves, and was

03:33 thrust into a scene that is entitled "The Bloodbath," where Lucy Gray and the games begin.

03:38 She's running from all of these tributes, trying to find her counterpart, Jessup Diggs,

03:42 who is wandering around the arena just as aimlessly as she is. I was thrust onto this

03:47 set that was filled with people who were much more experienced than I was in the choreography

03:51 and what we had to do. So I used that nerves, and I let it fuel the Lucy Gray within. I tried to use

03:58 that to really aid in my performance. To play Lucy Gray Baird, there were a few things that actually

04:04 helped me drop in, as a lot of actors say. Definitely the wig was helpful, and the costumes

04:10 that Trish Somerville designed. Tanner Marshall, my dialect coach, gave me a drop-in sentence,

04:16 which was, "I love chocolate brown cars." And I would say that and rewrite where I needed to be

04:21 something called oral posture, which is a whole thing I will not get into, but it's how you

04:26 drop into your character. So she had a very, like, tight-lipped smile. I think there's a natural

04:30 goodness born into us all. Reading the book, you read it as if she has a Southern drawl,

04:35 but they don't necessarily specify it. And so when I got that specificity, it changed my performance

04:41 that I had envisioned in my mind and gave me a whole new way into her as a character.

04:46 I was sent scratch recordings from Dave Cobb of the music that we perform as the Covey. Getting

04:56 to learn that was very, very comforting for me, because my home turf is being able to sing and

05:02 share musical gifts. That's always been my top skill on my resume, is that I am a singer and

05:07 a lover of music and a performer. I think that's also something that Lucy Gray kind of falls back

05:12 on. She relies on her musical talents and her ability to entertain.

05:16 ♪ Can't take my charm, can't take my humor ♪

05:21 ♪ You can take my world, 'cause it's just a rumor ♪

05:26 They landed on a very Appalachian, folksy, country sound for Lucy Gray's music and the

05:32 music she plays with the Covey. It's very lyrical. Dave Cobb had a lot of phone calls with Suzanne

05:37 to just make sure that the tempos were what she imagined, the tunes were what she imagined,

05:42 and the fullness of the band and the music were all within the realms of her imagination for this

05:49 world that she's created. I've had to sing with accents many times in my career. It is a little

05:54 bit difficult because as somebody who's classically trained, you're actually trained to sing without an

05:59 accent. I found it really fun and I found it as this gateway into her character that I didn't

06:04 really know I would find. There were a ton of singers that kind of inspired the voice of Lucy

06:09 Gray Baird. My audition song when I had a chemistry read with Tom Blythe was "Wildwood Flower," but

06:15 sung by Joan Baez. She's got this delicate voice that's a very beautiful soprano voice, but she can

06:20 come in very strong and so can Lucy Gray. We thought Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton and Dave

06:26 Cobb has actually worked with Dolly Parton a bunch, so it was very helpful to learn that those were

06:30 her inspirations. I will say musically, I learned guitar to play Lucy Gray. I kind of refined my

06:36 guitar skills. I kind of came into it as a four chord star and then came out knowing a lot more.

06:41 "Pure as the Driven Snow" was a bit harder because my fingers were on camera for all of it, so I

06:47 couldn't fake it at all. And so I played live. As far as they would let me take the song, I would

06:52 play guitar live, sing live, and do everything that I could. And it was such an amazing experience.

06:56 But "Pure as the Driven Snow" takes place in the Hob, there are people dancing, there's a lot of

07:00 technical elements that go into it. All of the sound was live recorded from a mic, so we had big

07:06 speakers in the room. It was very intense, but my most rewarding days of work, truly.

07:12 "Are you, are you coming to the tree? They strung up a man, they say who murdered three. Are you

07:24 coming to the tree where I told you to run?"

07:31 Whenever you're depicting something that is beloved, there's a lot of pressure there. And

07:36 I've done it before, so when it came to depicting this song that was so iconic, everybody already

07:41 knows the song. So how do you make it an iconic song that people want to remember 64 years into

07:48 the future? It's very hard. What we did is make it a lot more lyrical and a lot more heartfelt.

07:54 It's not yet a battle cry, it's not yet an anthem of a revolution. To sing it as if it were being

08:01 thought up in the moment is very special. What we did with it is so gorgeous, and I really owe it to

08:07 Dave Cobb for re-imagining it, but also for Suzanne for having this amazing idea in the book

08:13 to have this song that became iconic through the films and the original books to find its

08:18 origin story. So even though it is Coriolanus Snow's origin story, we get a lot of backstory

08:24 around the things that make him tick. Lucy Gray wakes up at 5.30 in the morning, I get in the car

08:33 about 30-45 minutes from wherever we're shooting. I immediately have a coffee. I have breakfast if I

08:39 can. I like to eat bacon in the morning, so I would have some bacon. I would hop right into

08:44 the hair chair with Nikki Gouley, our hair designer, and she would put my hair in a wig cap.

08:50 I had very short hair at the time, so it was not a long process, but you have to pretty much paint

08:55 your scalp your skin color and then put on a wig cap and just cut open a slit so that you can still

09:02 see that scalp so that when the wig is on it doesn't look like you don't have a scalp. And

09:05 then I would go into the makeup chair with Sherry Lawrence, who was our makeup designer and also my

09:10 personal on this movie. Depending on the day, it was either dirt and sweat, very clean looking,

09:15 or extremely made up. That was really fun because I've really never gotten to be extremely made up

09:20 in a movie before. And then I would pop back into the hair chair, put on my wig, then I'd be ready

09:25 to get costumed up with my dresser Val. There's a vest I wear at the Hob when I'm singing "Pure

09:31 as the Driven Snow" to Tom that is a hundred years old. It's a real vintage vest that Trish

09:36 Somerville, our costume designer, found. We have a lot of costumes along that line. They're so

09:41 beautiful. The skirts, the colors. We definitely did not hold back when it came to our costumes.

09:46 Costume it up, get in the car with my driver, Jan, who drove me to set every day. Then it's,

09:52 you know, you hit the ground running with rehearsal, cameras lining up, lights lining up,

09:57 get right into it. It's usually about 10 to 11 hours until you wrap and get undone. That process

10:03 for me was quite simple. On days that it was dirt, it was just a wipe. On days that it was makeup,

10:08 it was a little more intense than that because you want to take care of your skin as much as

10:11 you possibly can. So there was a lot of skin care that was involved in doing that. So you would kind

10:15 of unwind during the day, make sure you had a hot towel on your face, make sure that pore is good,

10:19 and take off the wig, get on your home clothes, get in the car, go back to your hotel or your

10:24 apartment and do it all again the next day. If you can trust anyone in this world, you can trust me.

10:28 Tom and I are very fortunate to have a very easygoing, collaborative work relationship.

10:34 We were obviously friends in real life, but work relationships are different. Being able to come

10:39 to him with these open conversations of things we want to do differently, if I do this, will you do

10:44 this or does that feel unnatural for you? It's not always easy with other actors. And so I felt very

10:50 lucky to have that with Tom. There is a scene that takes place in District 12 where Lucy Gray

10:55 is starting to wonder whether or not she can trust Coriolanus and their relationship starts to have a

11:00 bit of a contentious air. Tom reached for my chin and I flinched and it just worked. It was a physical

11:09 thing he decided to do because when you're fighting with a friend, fighting with a partner, sometimes

11:15 you want to assure them that everything is fine. And it changed the whole scene and it made it so

11:22 much better. And he did the same chin grab in a later scene. It was that same audience reaction

11:29 of, "Ooh, I don't know about that guy." I will say The Hunger Games is a very, very physically

11:35 demanding movie to film. I was very, very grateful to our stunt coordinators because I had a whirlwind

11:42 of a time getting to do the actual games. It's a lot of dodging. It's a lot of do like a backwards

11:47 tumble roll down an incline. I think my hardest day though, and even though it wasn't necessarily

11:52 physically demanding, there's a scene in the games where I'm pulling Nick Benson, who plays Jessup

11:57 Diggs, my District 12 counterpart, along in an underground tunnel. They had us running at full

12:03 speed while I'm pulling basically the entire weight of Nick, who's much bigger than me. And he's so

12:09 muscly. And I'm pulling him and it's dark and it's very dusty down there. It's very old. It was the

12:15 only time during our shooting process that I turned to Chris Surgeon, our first AD, and said,

12:19 "I have to go upstairs or I'm going to be sick." So we did it about four times before I was like,

12:25 "I don't think I can do this anymore." And they were very, very understanding of that

12:29 because I started to feel sick. What does my mentor do besides bring me roses?

12:34 I do my best to take care of you. You really want to take care of me in that arena?

12:39 Start by thinking I can actually win. The Hunger Games is a very emotional franchise.

12:43 Getting into the thick of these scenes was an emotional process. I had two really hard days.

12:49 One was watching someone I love very much in pain. Josh Rivera, who plays Sejanus, is someone who's

12:56 very close to me. And I was watching some very intense scenes for him that were intense physically

13:02 and emotionally. And they had to get my point of view. And I think I did two takes and I told

13:07 Frances through tears that I was done watching that for the day. And Josh kept making fun of

13:12 me as a boyfriend would and was like, "I'm fine. Everything's fine. It's just pretend. It's just

13:18 acting." But the image of it is so hard to have in your head of someone you love in any intense

13:23 situation. There's a scene right before Lucy Gray goes into the games and Coriolanus comes to her

13:28 and kind of attempts to give her strategy as a last-ditch effort to help her survive. That was

13:33 really emotional because Tom is so wonderful. And he's got these beautiful, big blue eyes. I always

13:39 tell him that he needs to wear brown contacts because it's hard not to stare at him. And he

13:43 came to me with his big, beautiful blue eyes pleading with me that I had to live and I had

13:48 to survive. And just feeling it so much. It was very late at night. It started to rain. I was in

13:53 a zoo enclosure. And I couldn't reach him. And I couldn't hug him and tell him that it was okay.

13:58 And I felt that so hard that day that it just made it so much easier to feel the intense emotions.

14:04 And I cried a lot that day. As an empathetic person, being an actor was the best job for me

14:09 because I could just feel somebody else's feelings so deeply that it helped me depict it as accurately

14:16 as possible. It is hard to distance yourself. I think a lot of actors probably feel that way.

14:22 My favorite way to get myself out of it is to talk to the people behind the camera. They're doing a

14:26 good job to make you look good. Talk to your focus operators. You talk to your camera operators. He

14:31 becomes your best friend. You're a camera operator. That's my only way of really taking myself out of

14:37 the shoes that I've put myself in as an actor is to talk to my crew, my dressers, my makeup artists,

14:44 my hair stylists, everybody involved. They're all the best people you'll meet on your sets.

14:49 They have the best stories and it helps you kind of remove yourself from the world of Panem.

14:53 I hope that Lucy Gray says and teaches people that it's okay to be on your own team and it's

15:05 wonderful to be your biggest fan and your supporter because at the end of the day,

15:10 we only have ourselves. She's aware of the loneliness that can come with that but also

15:16 the strength. There's a lot of strength in silence and there's strength in song and the

15:20 fact that she's able to kind of differentiate between the two and use them to her advantage

15:25 in the context of our movie, it's a really powerful thing and I think that that is a

15:29 very strong thing for her to say.

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