A major scene at the end of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was improvised. An adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games prequel, the movie follows the rise of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) as he eventually ascends to become the president of Panem. The movie also serves as somewhat of a love story between District 12 tribute Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) and Snow, as both struggle with the burden of the Hunger Games. Their story ends tragically, however, as Lucy Gray escapes Snow’s ever-tightening hold over her.
Appearing on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Zegler reveals that she and Blyth improvised one key scene that betrayed Lucy Gray’s intentions of leaving Snow. Without any direction from the script or director Francis Lawrence, Blyth touched her chin midway through filming. Zegler had an involuntary reaction that forced her to flinch away from Blyth’s touch, and that improvised response made it to the final cut. Check out the video and Zegler’s full quote below:
“There’s also, like, when we were doing reshoots, and we were doing a scene that we belovedly called ‘Love Alley’, and Tom grabbed my chin, and I just… ew. It’s after Lucy Grey’s kinda started to clock the Sejanus of it all, and a lot of things that are kind of changing in between the percentage of trust on either side of the relationship, and I had an involuntary flinch to Tom grabbing my chin, and it made it in there, and it’s so sick.
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