Jena Malone reveals she and Jennifer Lawrence filmed that racy “Hunger Games” scene separately
Lawrence had to be digitally added to the infamous elevator scene in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.
Ah, movie magic.
It turns out that the infamous Hunger Games: Catching Fire scene in which Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is introduced to a very naked Johanna Mason (Jena Malone) didn't, in fact, feature an introduction at all.
According to Malone, who spoke to Variety on Monday at the Los Angeles premiere of the prequel film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Lawrence was feeling under the weather when they shot the scene.
"The scenes that are fun are never fun to do — Jen was sick that day, so I ended up doing it without Jen, and so there wasn't a lot of people in the elevator," Malone recalled. "So I think we were just winging it and trying to get as much as we could get, because it was [shot] in a real hotel."
But, she added, "that's the magic of filmmaking, is you only need a few seconds to really create something that lasts."
In the memorable sequence, Katniss takes an elevator ride with Johanna, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) — during which Johanna declares that her "stylist is such an idiot" and promptly starts to take her clothes off.
"District 7, lumber, trees. I'd love to put my ax on her face. So what do you think, now that the whole world wants to sleep with you?" she asks the group, staring them down with a knowing smirk as she strips. As she leaves, she tells the aghast trio, "Thanks, let's do it again sometime," before Haymitch finally reveals to Peeta and Katniss who she is.
At the Songbirds & Snakes premiere, Malone also revealed that she was excited to see the movie with "fresh eyes" because she hadn't read the book it was based on. "I'm gonna go in with fresh eyes and see what they have to say," she said. "The Hunger Games is obviously a very intense, wildly heavy thing — I mean, we use the genre of fantasy to explore the things that are very hard for us to explore in our own life.
"But really, if you look at our reality right now, there's a lot of mirroring," she continued. "So I think it's important to see where this younger generation is gonna take this film, and push it and run with it, and hopefully change the world."
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes arrives in theaters Friday.
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