Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Director Francis Lawrence returns to direct the prequelThe Ballad of Songbirds and Snakesafter directingCatching Fire(2013) and the twoMockingjayfilms (2014 and 2015).

Francis teased toEmpiremagazinethat the new protagonist is an “anti-Katniss” in several ways.

“Katniss was an introvert and a survivor. She was quite quiet and stoic, you could almost say [she was] asexual. Lucy Gray is the opposite,” the director explained. “She wears her sexuality on her sleeve, [and] she really is a performer.”

He added of Lucy Gray, “She loves crowds. She knows how to play crowds and manipulate people.”

Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird and Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Murray Close/Lionsgate

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“She’s such a performer. Katniss is the opposite. This is a woman who loves and lives to perform,” said Jacobson. “To see the connection there, the history that she represents, and to think that Katniss Everdeen grew up knowing about Lucy Gray and this moment, it was just a great kind of microcosm of both how much of a new ground it is and how rooted it is in what we’ve seen, but in this backward-looking way.”

Lionsgate

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“One of the least Katniss things ever is to get up there and sing a song,” Jacobson said. “It’s a far cry from ‘I volunteer as tribute’ to ‘I’m gonna get up there, grab the mic and sing a song.' "

source: people.com