When the cast of the new Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping was announced one-by-one on social media, fans saw their dream casting come to life, from Mckenna Grace as District 12’s sassiest tribute, Maysilee Donner, to Elle Fanning stepping into Elizabeth Banks’ pastel wigs as Effie Trinket. Each reveal felt like Christmas came early, but despite how it looked, fans didn’t cast the movie.
In an exclusive interview with Bustle, Sunrise on the Reaping director Francis Lawrence and producer Nina Jacobson opened up about fan casting, admitting they love Suzanne Collins’ iconic book series as much as the fandom — but they didn’t intentionally listen to them.
“We don’t go to fan casting feeds and make our lists based on that,” Lawrence said. “When Elle talks about the fans wanting her, she’s 100% right, but she was at the top of our list of people to go to. She and I had worked together before, and she was who I wanted to play Effie. It just also is the fan choice.”
As Jacobson explained, she and Lawrence found out that Collins was writing Sunrise on the Reaping “way earlier” than any of her prior books, giving them extra time to adapt the novel into the film. “There was a long, long period where we could imagine our cast before people even knew the book was happening,” she says.
“We knew we wanted Jesse [Plemons] before the book was announced. We knew we wanted Elle before the book was announced,” Lawrence adds. “There are many, many, many people that we knew that we wanted to go for before anybody even knew there was a book.”
However, when the two realized their own hopes aligned with the fans, they knew they were on the right track. “It’s very easy for us to pay attention because we are the fans,” Jacobson says. “There’s very little distance ever between who they’re hoping for and who we envision because we’re kind of a hive mind in that regard.”
She went on to praise fans for trusting the creative team’s instincts and giving them the freedom other franchises usually don’t get. “I do think that we have the smartest, most thoughtful and expansive fans,” she says. “They’re not that kind of rigid haters whose things have to be exactly a certain way, or it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. There are a lot of franchises where the fans are like an albatross in a way. You need them, but you’re always worrying about them.”
