Hunger Games series director says prequel’s hero is more of a “performer” than Katniss

Francis Lawrence has directed every Hunger Games movie except for the first one, and he—arguably—knows the series better than most people because of that. Now, with his prequel The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes coming in November, he told Empire the key difference between regular hero Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence in the other movies) and new hero Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler): Lucy “wears her sexuality on her sleeve” while Katniss is almost “asexual.”

That’s kind of a surprising take, given the fact that the original Hunger Games saga partially hinges on a love triangle (even if it’s never super believable, since Peeta is a nice boy who does everything right and Gale is just also there… sometimes), but he went further with it by adding that Lucy “really is a performer,” which does very much set her apart from Katniss. The show is a big part of the Hunger Games in this universe, which is why everyone had crazy hair and outfits (and names, if that counts), but a recurring thing in the original series is that Katniss has no interest in that and basically has to pretend she has a personality in order to get people to listen to her—though she does get points for being an explicitly anti-fascist hero, which is better than a show personality anyway.

But back to Lucy, Lawrence says that she “loves crowds” and “knows how to play crowds and manipulate people,” which seems to mean that she’s really the kind of person that Katniss pretends to be (or the kind of person that the people insist that she is, even when it’s not really true), so maybe we’re supposed to believe that the events of Songbirds & Snakes is where this world falls in love with that kind of heroic archetype… or maybe we’re giving this movie a lot of credit based on one thing the director said, months before it even comes out in theaters.

Either way, The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes is set a few decades before the original Hunger Games series, with Zegler being joined by Tom Blyth as a younger version of Donald Sutherland’s President Snow. It comes out on November 17.