Molly McCann, the 15-year-old Irish actress playing Louella McCoy in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, had watched the original Hunger Games films for the first time only a few months before she auditioned for the prequel in early 2025, and she admits she had no idea how enormous the fanbase on the other side of that audition really was. “I think I would have been very nervous if I had known how big it is,” she told Deadline in an interview published today.
The film brought a string of firsts with it. Sunrise on the Reaping was her first time shooting in a studio, at Studio Babelsberg in Germany, and her first time dyeing her hair, which turned out to be a bigger change than she expected. “I didn’t realize that when you dye your hair, you see yourself so differently,” she said. “I just thought it was the coolest thing ever.”
Director Francis Lawrence, who has guided the franchise since Catching Fire, became someone she could lean on throughout the shoot. “He was always open for discussion, which made it great to know I could talk through things with him,” she said. “It really gave a sense of security while doing the scenes.”
The hardest work was Louella’s reaping, the moment her name is called for the Games. McCann studied the earlier films and watched the faces of Katniss Everdeen and her sister Prim as they were called, looking for the exact expression to carry forward. “It was challenging to get the look down that was scared but also controlled because you didn’t want the Capitol to see you scared at any point because you didn’t want to look weak to them,” she said. “Francis would always tell me to use my eyes and put it all through my eyes and keep it really contained while I acted.”
McCann has been acting nearly her whole life. Both of her parents are actors and her mother runs a stage school, and she was cast at five years old in the 2018 drama Rosie. She went on to earn an Irish Film and Television Academy nomination for Herself, the Phyllida Lloyd drama in which she played the daughter of Clare Dunne’s character, opposite Harriet Walter. “She was such an amazing director and Harriet Walter is a legend,” she said of Lloyd. “It was a great learning curve for me.” She has also appeared in Bad Sisters.
Before Panem, she filmed The Butler, an action comedy from director Tom Edmunds in which Jean Reno plays a former World War I commando turned butler whose quiet life is upended by mobsters collecting an old debt. McCann plays Harriett, a girl in his care, in a cast that also includes Tom Hollander. “It’s quite Christmassy with lots of action-packed moments,” she said.
As for what she wants next, she already has a dream role picked out. “If someone ever did a musical movie version of Beetlejuice, I would just love to be Lydia,” she said. “I love Beetlejuice. I think it’s fantastic.”
McCann’s time on the Sunrise set gave her more than a career milestone. In the on-set interviews she filmed during production, she talked about the friendships she made with her fellow District 12 tributes, and the film’s trailer shows the 50th Hunger Games she steps into as Louella, the youngest of the four. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in theaters on November 20.