Maya Hawke went into The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping with one question she kept coming back to: who was Wiress before her games? Hawke plays the younger Wiress in the prequel, stepping into a role Amanda Plummer played in Catching Fire as a victor whose trauma had left her almost nonverbal.
In a new interview released by Lionsgate, Hawke says the road to Panem started for her with the original films, and with Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, she says, is “a massive portion of the pie of why I wanted to be an actor,” crediting Lawrence with turning the action and sci-fi genre into a place where an actor could really give “a capital P performance.” “She was brave and gutsy and bold and strong and weird and funny and so human,” Hawke says of Katniss. “And she wasn’t perfect.” For Hawke, “it was extremely moving to me,” and she adds, “I’ve been a huge fan of the series for as long as I could watch movies.”
Here is Hawke on Lawrence and Katniss, in her own words:
That question, who Wiress was before, shaped how Hawke built the character. In Catching Fire, she notes, audiences meet a Wiress who is “almost nonverbal” and “really pretty freaked out,” so her early conversations about the role kept circling back to “how does she get there?” Her answer starts with a young woman who has always operated, as she puts it, “in a different key,” so intelligent that she does not quite move through the world the way everyone else does. With each trauma, Hawke says, Wiress’s ability to hear other people’s keys faded a little more, leaving her increasingly isolated inside her own.
Beetee is the exception. Hawke calls Wiress’s bond with the fellow District 3 victor, played by Kelvin Harrison Jr., “so special because it’s really the meeting of minds,” describing the one person who can communicate in Wiress’s key. “It’s so special when two really unique people find someone who understands them,” she says. Mags, played by Lili Taylor, reads her differently. Hawke gets the sense that Mags is “a little bit mystified by Wiress,” and while Mags throws herself into mentoring the District 12 tributes, Wiress hangs back, uneasy with even the performance the Games demand of her.
The company around her made an impression, too. Hawke calls Taylor “unspeakably kind, wildly generous and very warm,” and admits the schedule could be overwhelming for a relatively new actor, acting opposite Glenn Close one day and Ralph Fiennes the next. She saves some of her warmest praise for director Francis Lawrence, whose ability to run a production this size while giving every performer, even those with no lines, real direction she calls “extremely rare.”
Hawke has been one of the film’s most thoughtful voices on its press tour. Earlier this month she praised Mckenna Grace’s grit during the shoot, and the cast’s world tour has carried the film to stops including Berlin. She ends the interview simply grateful to be part of Suzanne Collins’s world: “I’m grateful to be here.”
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, headlined by Joseph Zada as Haymitch Abernathy, opens in theaters on November 20. Watch the trailer here.