Mckenna Grace plays Maysilee Donner, a District 12 tribute in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. On Wednesday night in London, at a fan screening of the film, the 20-year-old looked up and saw her own face on a poster hanging from the ceiling, alongside the rest of the cast.
“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” she told press at the screening. “It’s making me really emotional looking up at that. There’s a poster up there of all of our faces.” The scale of the production, she said, is still sinking in. “I’ve never been a part of anything quite like this, and I don’t know if I ever will again, and so this has been like the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Grace calls the cast her family, and says the weeks of promotion have felt the same way. “Getting to be on this press tour with what’s like my family has been really fun,” she said, adding that being on set every day “didn’t feel real.” During filming, she lived with co-stars Joseph Zada, who plays Haymitch Abernathy, and Iona Bell, a pair she calls her “little family.”
Sunrise on the Reaping is the sixth Hunger Games film, a prequel set 24 years before Katniss Everdeen’s story. It follows Haymitch as a teenager through the 50th Hunger Games, the Second Quarter Quell, which sends twice the usual number of tributes into the arena, four of them from District 12. The film opens in theaters on November 20, and tickets are on sale now, with IMAX early access screenings on November 18.
Her co-stars are stepping into roles that carry their own weight. Elle Fanning plays a younger Effie Trinket, the Capitol escort Elizabeth Banks made a fan favorite in the original films, and Fanning told The Hollywood Reporter that Banks reached out as soon as she landed the part. “I’ve met her before and she actually was so kind and she sent me these beautiful flowers and said, ‘May the odds be ever in your favor,’” Fanning said. “She made that role iconic and so lovable and so I hope I can live up to what she did for the fans.” The two have texted since.
Kieran Culkin takes over as Caesar Flickerman, the flamboyant host of the Games, a role Stanley Tucci defined in the earlier films. Culkin admitted the shadow of that performance nearly scared him off. “To me, this was like a no-brainer,” he said. “Don’t do it, because everyone loves what Stanley Tucci did with the role.” When fans stopped him just after he signed on, he joked that they should “lower those expectations,” because he had no idea yet what he would do with the character. He has not spoken to Tucci about the role, but he has found his own take, one he says connects to Tucci’s. Whether his Caesar feels any empathy for the tributes, he explained, is beside the point. “He needs to succeed. He needs this to go well,” Culkin said. “So it doesn’t matter whether or not he has empathy; he shuts it off.”
Asked what she hopes audiences take from the film, Grace pointed to the story’s message about patience and hope. “Change doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “Change is possible if you work hard and you believe, and you don’t give up in what you believe in.”