Josh Andrés Rivera is speeding through Manhattan, ranting about Coriolanus Snow. Over Zoom, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes star journeys through Rockefeller Center looking for a quiet place to chat. Our interview is the appointment between appointments. Since Lionsgate obtained an interim agreement with SAG-AFTRA for the film, days before the strike ended, the young cast has been promoting the film non-stop. The chemistry between the leads makes for a perfect palette cleanser after the sobering events of The Hunger Games prequel.
The film’s whirlwind press tour has often featured Rivera’s dry sense of humor, but in retrospect, that might be the Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth effect. Without his co-stars to play off of, he’s all introspection and as sincere as the character he plays in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. More importantly, he’s on the move physically and metaphorically. In a few days, he’ll get a short break to reconvene with his scattered siblings for the holiday. Then it’s off to the next project, a starring role in American Sports Story.
The week of Thanksgiving is one of the most hectic times of the year to face midtown, but Rivera doesn’t miss a single beat. It’s impressive but not surprising. Before Rivera broke out, alongside his Ballad co-star and IRL girlfriend Rachel Zegler, in Stephen Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story, he was a standby in the second or national tour of Hamilton that launched in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2017. For those more versed in Panem than Broadway, a standby’s job is to understudy multiple roles and be on call to play any of those parts at a moment’s notice. (The star-studded cast of this particular tour, dubbed the “Angelica tour”, included not only Rivera but also Tony nominees Joshua Henry and Jordan Donica, Broadway leading lady Solea Pfeiffer, and The Umbrella Academy star Emmy Raver-Lampman. The power of Hamilton, man.)
In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Rivera plays one of the many tragic characters shoved aside in Coriolanus Snow’s path to power: Sejanus Plinth, a fellow outsider whose family moved from District 2 to the Capitol when the war made them rich. He doesn’t understand the necessity to hold the Hunger Games when the war ended 10 years ago — which is devastating, considering that the audience knows they’ll continue for over six decades more.
“There's an interesting kind of foil there,” Rivera says, between Sejanus and Coriolanus. “I think a lot of people in the Capitol have this sort of side-eye to the Plinth family because they originally came from the districts [...] and that stays with you. You can't really buy your way into the society aspect of it. And Coriolanus is quite the opposite. Where his dad is a war hero and he has such an esteemed family name and yet nothing at all money-wise.”
In a way, Sejanus is the closest the Hunger Games franchise has to an audience surrogate. Very rarely do characters in this world speak truth to power so bluntly. Even Joanna Mason played the game, so to speak. Sejanus isn’t interested in that. “He's meant to be the person that everybody empathizes with,” says Rivera. “And you know, obviously faces a lot of backlash and adversity because of that. But he's the one with basically what we would deem kind of ‘modern morals’ within the scope of this environment.”
He sees the corruption of Panem for what it is and can’t help but fight back, whether that means standing up to a teacher, sneaking into the arena, or becoming a rebel himself. His hope gets taken away from him time and time again. “I would go home with like a lot of questions that I would ask myself hypothetically,” Rivera says. “What is the right way to be right? Like, how do you tactfully navigate the environment that you're in to make lasting change? I think that's something that his character was working towards that ultimately, unfortunately, didn't work out for him.”
How does corruption happen in government, he posits, both in history and fictional places like Panem? How are characters like Coriolanus and Sejanus, who represent two very different types of societal privilege — wealth versus status — informed by that? “Coriolanus is navigating this world in an entirely different way than Sejanus is,” he says. “Something else that comes up a lot is Coryo's resentment of Sejanus' wealth and Sejanus having this kind of privilege that he grew up with. Coriolanus acts from a survival mechanism standpoint. Like he's just trying to stay alive and keep his family name strong. He has a completely different motivation and I think he goes back and forth with whether or not he even approves of the Hunger Games.” Coriolanus gets put on this other path because of those doubts, and ends up, Rivera continues, “serving the system that kind of initially was the reason that he was in trouble in the first place.”
He apologizes for ranting, but it’s hard not to talk about Coriolanus, honestly. The complicated, maybe begrudging, “muddy” relationship in Josh’s words between the two characters is one of the film’s stealth strengths. They’re both observant characters. (With a tragic exception — the one time that Sejanus lets his hyper-observant guard down around Coriolanus is the time that his friend ultimately betrays him.)
“I think there's a lot of intentions that are relatively ambiguous when it comes to Coriolanus,” he says, maybe putting it lightly. “I think it meant something to Coryo that Sejanus could tell that he wasn't where he pretended he was in terms of status and wealth and decided that he wanted to help him.” While Coriolanus claims to only “tolerate” Sejanus while trying to impress his high status classmates, there is ultimately a friendship there. “Even that kind of baseline of socializing means a lot to Sejanus being such an outsider,” Rivera says. “He's a supremely lonely guy, I think.”
Then, in District 12, he becomes a Peacekeeper and has another crisis of faith. “There's this kind of implication, once you see Sejanus on the train that from here on out everything's gonna be alright,” Rivera says. “He got out of the Capitol. The whole movie he's talking about being in the Capitol, [how] it's gonna kill him, and he can't do it anymore. He gets out and he's feeling pretty good and, uh, very quickly he realizes that nothing's changed. The Capitol's grip on people is just as strong in the districts as it ever was. He's joining the Peacekeepers, this big military industrial arm of the Capitol, and it's just as authoritarian.”
The definitive moment for Sejanus happens at the event that inspires Lucy Gray Baird to start writing “The Hanging Tree” in the film. Sejanus and Coriolanus witness a woman get arrested for crying out when her husband is killed. “He says to Coriolanus, ‘if she got through the guards, do you think you would've been able to shoot her? 'cause I don't think I could.’ It kind of cements, like, that's what we are here for. That's what we're supposed to do, to be the government's strongarm for people who are having a terrible time under our leadership.” Even becoming a medic would mean being complicit. So he starts to look for ways to help people outside of the system, and things unravel from there. At the end of the day “he's not Coriolanus,” Rivera says, “you know, he's not a master tactician or a manipulator. He just tries his best.”
The similarities between Sejanus and Katniss are visible in both the book and the movie, especially when a childhood classmate who once paid Sejanus a kindness, Marcus, ends up in the arena. (That was an interesting relationship to explore as far as what it meant for the subtext,” Rivera says off-hand.) Fans have picked up on even more parallels. It’s easy to see how Lucy Gray Baird came back to haunt Coriolanus Snow in the form of Katniss Everdeen, through their similarities and differences. But Sejanus’ memory must have come back to haunt him too, right?
There is some force or “component of Katniss” there, muses Josh. “I was thinking about [the parallels] too, you know, 'cause there's some kind of foil, I think, for a lot of people that exist in the original series. And I'm trying to figure out what Sejanus' is. I think it's meant to be, it kind of symbolizes the ideas that end up taking shape. This is all my speculation. I never got the chance to ask Suzanne [Collins] about this, but I'd like to think that it kind of symbolizes the initial flames being quelled.” Which, he says again, further steers Coryo from doing what’s right.
Producer Nina Jacobson has said in a few interviews at this point that when crafting and casting the role of Sejanus, one of the concerns was that he not come off too “earnest.” I ask if that was expressed to him at all during the process. It was, he says.
“I think that because of his function as the moral compass and the person to kind of keep reiterating these ideas, that can start to get... the function of that is you want to hear how other characters respond to that. So he says it a lot. It kind of happens a lot of the times that he's on screen. He says some variation of like, ‘we can't do this’, ‘this is wrong’. And then other people react to that in some way or another. I think that it was important to them that it didn't become whiny after a certain point.”
Earnest people can still be right and get angry, I would point out, but it’s important to Sejanus’ arc that we don’t see him as naive. And adaptation is tricky that way. “You have the luxury with the text where you have like 500-600 pages to, you know, kind of explain and nuance around it,” Rivera says. “On screen it just gets a little bit more complicated. You have less time to make the most impact with the most nuance and the most, like, juiciness that you can, and then, and then you get to the next plot point.”
“Whiny” Sejanus is not. Yelling, on the other hand, is another story. It’s become an accidental Josh Andrés Rivera speciality. When the trailer for his Hunger Games film dropped, Rivera’s Instagram post included a meme in a photoset about how his characters in both The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and West Side Story have big screaming moments. As he’s already discussed, Sejanus loses it on multiple occasions. Chino, his character in WSS, has one of musical theatre’s biggest meltdowns. I ask, joking, if this was a thread he planned to follow for the remainder of his career. He cackles.
“It's not anything I intend! I don't know,” he says, shrugging, “I get hired and people want me to scream. I don't know what it is. I do scream in my next project. I guess people like the timbre of my yelling. All I can tell you is that in the script, it was in all caps. And I was like, okay, let's go.”
That next project, of course, is Ryan Murphy’s American Sports Story, in which Rivera will portray former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who was charged with first degree murder in 2013 and died by suicide in 2017. His story was dark and complicated, which Ryan Murphy and of course Rivera himself are clearly comfortable with, though Rivera does cite an additional “slew of challenges” to telling a story that actually happened. “I'm excited by the process,” he says. “It's been very rewarding. I feel like I'm learning a lot and it's just a different muscle that I haven't really gotten to work before on a professional level, you know?” He played football in high school, but didn’t follow professional sports as much as an adult and was on the aforementioned Hamilton tour when this went down. “I actually found out most of it from the documentary,” he says.
On a lighter note, “I'm working out a ton,” he says. “I've been trying to keep my shape during strike. It's been a challenge but it's been very rewarding because, you know, I meant to get in shape anyways. So it's kind of nice to have a little fire under being like, well, now you have to, so, you're welcome.” There’s that dry humor I was anticipating.
