How Rachel Zegler Became Lucy Gray Baird in 'The Hunger Games' 🕊🐍

There's a line that Lucy Gray says,

I don't sing when I'm told,

I sing when I have something to say.

I think it's a very powerful line.

I carry it with me that we get to make our voices heard

in a way that is meaningful.

Then you've done your job as a person,

for me, as an actor, as a public figure.

And I think that's a really beautiful thing about Lucy Gray.

And I didn't necessarily realize it

until that scene and that line.

Hi, my name is Rachel Zegler,

and this is how I became Lucy Gray Baird

in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

[intense music]

I was a huge Hunger Games fan.

I think the first movie came out when I was 10 or 11.

I remember seeing the trilogy of books

at my Scholastic Book Fair.

And I just fell in love with the characters, with the story.

Katniss was such a compelling character to me.

I read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in 2020,

and I fell in love with Lucy Gray.

I thought it was such a fun idea for a character,

that the musical aspect was so interesting.

My agent called me when I was living in London,

working on another job, and he said

that Francis Lawrence really wanted to meet with me

about playing Lucy Gray.

And he offered me the part.

He said that they were going to be shooting

in Poland and in Germany and the idea

of being away from home for a whole year

was really, really terrifying to me.

And so I initially turned him down.

And then I sang at The Grammys that year.

And I was at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas

and I stumbled upon The Hunger Games exhibition,

and I felt this FOMO in my heart [laughs]

that I was gonna miss out on doing something really special.

Things came together a few months after that

and here we are.

[light music]

Lucy Gray is an incredibly mercurial character.

You never really know what role of the dice

you're going to get.

I think her intentions are unclear

which unnerves Coriolanus

throughout the entirety of our story.

She always seems to have something up her sleeve.

Once you embrace the fact

that you never know what you're gonna get,

you kind of free yourself in your performance a lot.

There's obviously very meticulous details

that we tried to keep from the book.

But then there are moments that are ad-libbed in our film.

The wile in her eyes, that was all,

you know, conversations that I had with Francis,

conversations I had with Tom,

in the scenes that you have together.

You just wanna make it seem like

as book accurate as you can

'cause that's what fans really care about.

I knew that I was rooting for Lucy Gray in the book

when she's referred to as the runt girl from District 12.

We know how that goes.

Not necessarily by Katniss being the runt girl,

because she wasn't, she was a volunteer.

It's almost as if Prim had actually gone into the games,

because Primrose Everdeen was the runt girl

from District 12.

And so I was immediately drawn to this what-if scenario.

What if it actually was somebody that nobody believed in?

People really believed in Katniss

'cause she showed a fiery strength

the second she volunteered for her sister.

Everybody is doubting Lucy Gray

from the second she steps up there.

She also knows that her name is being picked.

She's aware that the mayor's daughter is jealous of her

and has her father call her name.

And I think Sejanus also says it in the book,

says that, It was probably rigged.

Like her name wasn't actually on that slip

'cause she's all made up, she's wearing her favorite dress,

she's going to give them a show

whether they like it or not.

A lot of the preparation was happening

while I wasn't available,

and I missed a lot of the stunt training

and the stunt choreography.

So my day one, I landed in Wroclaw, Poland.

I went to Centennial Hall where we shot The Games themselves

and was thrust into a scene

that is entitled The Bloodbath

where Lucy Gray and The Games begin.

And she's running from all of these tributes trying

to find her counterpart, Jessup Diggs, who is wandering

around the arena just as aimlessly as she is.

I was thrust onto this set that was filled with people

who were much more experienced than I was

in the choreography and what we had to do.

So I used that nerves

and I let it fuel the Lucy Gray within.

And I tried to use that to really aid in my performance.

To play Lucy Gray Baird,

there were a few things that actually helped me drop in,

as a lot of actors say.

Definitely the wig was helpful

and the costumes that Trish Summerville designed,

Tanera Marshall, my dialect coach,

gave me a drop-in sentence, which was,

I love chocolate brown cars.

And I would say that and rewrite where I needed

to be, something called oral posture,

which is a whole thing I will not get into,

but it's how you drop into your character.

So she had a very like tight-lipped smile.

I think there's a natural goodness born into a song.

Reading the book, you read it

as if she has a Southern drawl,

but they don't necessarily specify it.

And so when I got that specificity,

it changed my performance that I had envisioned in my mind

and gave me a whole new way into her as a character.

[light music]

I was sent scratch recordings from Dave Cobb of the music

that we perform as the Covey.

Getting to learn that was very, very comforting for me

because my home turf is being able to sing

and share musical gifts.

That's always been my top skill on my resume

is that I am a singer and a lover of music and a performer.

I think that's also something that Lucy Gray

kind of falls back on.

She relies on her musical talents

and her ability to entertain.

♪ Can't take a my charm ♪

♪ Can't take a my humor ♪

♪ You can take my wealth ♪

♪ 'Cause it's just a rumor ♪

They landed on a very Appalachian, folksy, country sound

for Lucy Gray's music

and the music she plays with the Covey, it's very lyrical.

Dave Cobb had a lot of phone calls with Suzanne

to just make sure that the tempos were what she imagined,

the tunes were what she imagined,

and the fullness of the band

and the music were all within the realms of her imagination

for this world that she's created.

I've had to sing with accents many times in my career.

It is a little bit difficult

because as somebody who's classically trained,

you're actually trained to sing without an accent.

I found it really fun

and I found it as this gateway into her character

that I didn't really know I would find.

There were a ton of singers that kind

of inspired the voice of Lucy Gray Baird.

My audition song when I had a chemistry read

with Tom Blythe was Wildwood Flower,

but sung by Joan Baez.

She's got this delicate voice

that's a very beautiful soprano voice,

but she can come in very strong and so can Lucy Gray.

We thought Patsy Klein, and Dolly Parton,

and Dave Cobb has actually worked with Dolly Parton a bunch.

So it was very helpful to learn

that those were her inspirations.

I will say musically I learned guitar to play Lucy Gray.

I kind of refined my guitar skills.

I kind came into it as a four-chord star

and then came out knowing a lot more.

Pure as a Driven Snow was a bit harder

because my fingers were on camera for all of it.

So I couldn't fake it at all.

And so I played live.

As far as they would let me take the song,

I would play guitar live, sing live,

and do everything that I could

and it was such an amazing experience.

But Pure as the Driven Snow takes place in the Hob.

There are people dancing, there's a lot

of technical elements that go into it.

All of the sound was live recorded from a mic,

so we had big speakers in the room.

It was very intense.

But my most rewarding days of work, truly.

♪ Are you are you coming to the tree ♪

♪ I they strung up a man ♪

♪ They say who murdered three ♪

♪ Are you coming to the tree ♪

♪ Where I told you to run ♪

Whenever you're depicting something that is beloved,

there's a lot of pressure there and I've done it before.

So when it came to depicting this song that was so iconic,

everybody already knows the song.

So how do you make it an iconic song that people want

to remember 64 years into the future?

It's very hard.

What we did is make it a lot more lyrical

and a lot more heartfelt.

It's not yet a battle cry,

it's not yet an anthem of a revolution.

To sing it as if it were being thought up

in the moment is very special.

What we did with it is so gorgeous

and I really owe it to Dave Cobb for re-imagining it,

but also for Suzanne

for having this amazing idea in the book to have this song

that became iconic through the films

and the original books to find its origin story.

So even though it is Coriolanus Snow's origin story,

we get a lot of backstory around the things

that make him tick.

[light music]

Lucy Gray wakes up at 5:30 in the morning.

I get in the car, about 30, 45 minutes

from wherever we're shooting.

Immediately have a coffee.

I have breakfast if I can.

I like to eat bacon in the morning.

So I would have some bacon.

I would hop right into the hair chair with Nikki Gooley,

our hair designer, and she would put my hair in a wig cap.

I had very short hair at the time,

so it was not a long process,

but you have to pretty much paint your scalp

your skin color and then put on a wig cap

and just cut open a slit so that you can still see

that scalp so that when the wig is on,

it doesn't look like you don't have a scalp.

And then I would go into the makeup chair

with Sherri Laurence, who was our makeup designer

and also my personal on this movie, depending on the day,

it was either dirt and sweat, very clean looking,

or extremely made up.

That was really fun 'cause I've really never gotten

to be extremely made up in a movie before.

And then I would pop back into the hair chair,

put on my wig, then I'd be ready to get costumed up

with my dresser, Val.

There's a vest I wear at the Hob

when I'm singing Pure as the Driven Snow to Tom

that is 100 years old.

It's a real vintage vest that Trish Summerville,

our costume designer found.

We have a lot of costumes along that line.

They're so beautiful.

The skirts, the colors, we definitely did not hold back

when it came to our costumes.

Costume it up, get in the car with my driver Yon,

who drove me to set every day.

Then it's, you know, you hit the ground running

with rehearsal, cameras lining up,

lights lining up, get right into it.

It's usually about 10 to 11 hours

until you wrap and and get undone.

That process for me was quite simple.

On days that it was dirt, it was just a wipe.

On days that it was makeup,

it was a little more intense than that

'cause you want to take care of your skin

as much as you possibly can.

So there was a lot of skincare

that was involved in doing that.

So you would kind of unwind during the day,

make sure you had a hot towel on your face, make sure

that pores are good and take off the wig,

get on your home clothes, get in the car, go back

to your hotel or your apartment

and do it all again the next day.

If you can trust anyone in this world, you can trust me.

Tom and I are very fortunate to have

a very easygoing, collaborative, work relationship.

We've obviously friends in real life,

but work relationships are different.

Being able to come to him with these open conversations

of things we wanna do differently.

If I do this, will you do this?

Or does that feel unnatural for you?

It's not always easy with other actors

and so I felt very lucky to have that with Tom.

There is a scene that takes place in District 12

where Lucy Gray is starting to wonder whether

or not she can trust Coriolanus

and their relationship starts to have a bit

of a contentious air.

Tom reached for my chin and I flinched

and it just worked.

It was a physical thing he decided to do

because when you're fighting with a friend,

fighting with a partner, sometimes you want to assure them

that everything is fine.

And it changed the whole scene

and it made it so much better.

And he did the same chin grab in a later scene.

It was that same audience reaction of,

Ooh, I don't know about that guy.

I will say the Hunger Games is a very,

very physically demanding movie to film.

I was very, very grateful to our stunt coordinators

because I had a whirlwind of a time getting

to do the actual Games.

It's a lot of dodging, it's a lot

of do like a backwards tumble roll down an incline.

I think my hardest day though,

and even though it wasn't necessarily physically demanding,

there's a scene in The Games where I'm pulling Nick Benson,

who plays Jessup Diggs, my district 12 counterpart,

along in a underground tunnel.

They had us running at full speed

while I'm pulling basically the entire weight of Nick,

who's much bigger than me.

And he's so muscly and I'm pulling him and it's dark

and it's very dusty down there.

It's very old.

It was the only time during our shooting process

that I turned to Chris Surgent, our first ED,

and said, I have to go upstairs or I'm going to be sick.

So we did it about four times before I was like,

I don't think I can do this anymore.

And they were very, very understanding of that

'cause I started to feel sick.

What does my mentor do besides bring me roses?

I do my best to take care of you.

You really want to take care of me in that arena?

Start by thinking I can actually win.

The Hunger Games is is a very emotional franchise.

Getting into the thick of these scenes

was an emotional process.

I had two really hard days.

One was watching someone I love very much in pain.

Josh Rivera, who plays Sejanus is someone who's very close

to me and I was watching some very intense scenes for him

that were intense physically and emotionally

and they had to get my point of view.

And I think I did two takes.

And I told Francis, through tears, that I was done watching

that for the day and Josh kept making fun of me

as a boyfriend would

and was like, I'm fine, everything's fine.

It's just pretend.

It's just acting.

But the image of it is so hard to have in your head

of someone you love in any intense situation.

There's a scene right before Lucy Gray goes into The Games

and Coriolanus comes to her

and kind of attempts to give her strategy

as a last ditch effort to help her survive.

That was really emotional because Tom is so wonderful

and he's got these beautiful, big blue eyes.

I always tell him that he needs to wear brown contacts

'cause it's hard not to stare at him.

And he came to me with these big,

beautiful blue eyes pleading with me that I had to live

and I had to survive and just feeling it so much.

It was very late at night.

It started to rain.

I was in a zoo enclosure and I couldn't reach him

and I couldn't hug him and and tell him that it was okay.

And I felt that so hard that day that it just made it

so much easier to feel the intense emotions.

And I cried a lot that day.

As an empathetic person,

being an actor was the best job for me

because I could just feel somebody else's feelings so deeply

that it helped me depict it as accurately as possible.

It is hard to distance yourself.

I think a lot of actors probably feel that way.

My favorite way to get myself out of it is to talk

to the people behind the camera.

They're doing a good job to make you look good.

Talk to your focus operators.

Talk to your camera operators.

He becomes your best friend, your A camera operator.

That's my only way of really taking myself out of the shoes

that I've put myself in as an actor, is to talk to my crew,

my dressers, my makeup artists,

my hair stylists, everybody involved.

They're all the best people you'll meet on your sets.

They have the best stories

and it helps you kind

of remove yourself from the world of Panem.

[light music]

I hope that Lucy Gray says

and teaches people that it's okay to be on your own team

and it's wonderful to be

your biggest fan and your supporter

'cause at the end of the day, we only have ourselves.

She's aware of the loneliness that can come with that,

but also the strength.

There's a lot of strength in silence

and there's strength in song.

And the fact that she's able to kind of differentiate

between the two and use them to her advantage in the context

of our movie, it's a really powerful thing.

And I think that that is a very strong thing for her to say.