Peter Dinklage cast in The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes
Dinklage joins Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Hunter Schafer, and Jason Schwartzman in the prequel film
Aux News Unknown
In the continued quest to make the new Hunger Games prequel a worthy successor to the original series, The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes has added Peter Dinklage to the cast in a major role, according to a Deadline report. Dinklage joins a list of previously announced stars which includes Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler as the leads.
Dinklage will play the dean of the Academy, Casca Highbottom. With a name like that, he sounds like he should be teaching at Hogwarts, but instead he’s the original architect of the Hunger Games, who has a tense relationship with future president Coriolanus Snow (Blyth).
“Dean Highbottom is one of the most powerful people in Snow’s life. As the austere and vindictive face of the games, he sets the rules that will determine every aspect of Coriolanus’s fate. I’m thrilled that Peter will be bringing him to life,” says longtime Hunger Games director Francis Lawrence (per Deadline).
Lionsgate’s Motion Picture Group president Nathan Kahane praises Dinklage as “one of the best actors alive,” while franchise producer Nina Jacobson adds, “I cannot think of an actor more perfectly suited to inhabit the role of Highbottom. As the man credited with conceiving the Hunger Games and the Dean of the Academy, Casca Highbottom is a character with secrets. Peter’s magnetism, intensity and dark humor will infuse him with the intelligence, depth and pathos that the role demands.”
Many of the players in Songbirds And Snakes are similar, or have direct ties to, characters from the original series. In Suzanne Collins’ novel, Highbottom is an addict who struggles with his role in the games, not unlike Katniss’ mentor Haymitch Abernathy (played by Woody Harrelson). More closely connected are Hunter Schafer’s character Tigris (an older version of whom appears in Mockingjay) and Jason Schwartzman’s character Lucretius “Lucky” Flickerman (an ancestor of Stanley Tucci’s character Caesar Flickerman).
One would expect a degree of overlap in a prequel, but Lionsgate is surely also hoping to cash in on the familiar formula that made the originals a hit. Of course, adding Dinklage to the cast is a smart way to boost the film’s chances of success.
14 Comments
Dinklage fires up the bedroom eyes!
THE DWARF LIVES UNTIL WE FIND A COCK MERCHANT.
Is that really what passes for dialogue in these things?
So Highbottom will be the Slytherin of the Hunger Games universe.
The only thing that could justify a so unnecessary prequel is to flesh out how the United States of America got to a point where giving people as stupid names as “Casca Highbottom”, “Coriolanus Snow”, and all the otheres, became not only acceptable, but common…
Sounds like names from a sketch Monty Python couldn’t be bothered to finish.
I haven’t read the books, and only casually watched the movies. Is it really supposed to be dystopian future USA? I just assumed “random Sci-fi hellscape”.
It takes place after a civil war has split the US into regional districts. The Capital is Denver with his natural defenses of mountains and elevation. District 12 (Katniss’ home, mining country) is Appalachia, the nuclear bombed-out District 13 is the rebellious Northeast where the survivors have been driven underground, District 7 (lumber, home of Joanna Mason and her ax) is the Pacific Northwest, District 11 (agriculture) is the Deep South (hence the Black tributes), etc.
Well, ok then. Thanks!
And District 9 is in Johannesburg and full of fooking prawns.
Never a bad idea to cast Dinklage in anything but “HighBottom?” Teehee. bottom. also weird disconnect between “high” and “bottom”. Just a terrible name, really.
I can’t wait to see his new house!
This feels wholly unnecessary (who watched the movies or read the books and thought “I’d like to know more about Donald Sutherland’s terrible, awful, no-good human being”? Maybe someone did, but I’d have much rather gotten a Haymitch prequel, personally.), but casting Jason Schwartzman as a Caesar Flickerman relative is pretty goddamn inspired.