Sunrise On The Reaping Cast

Huddle up, Hunger Games fans — casting news coming at you warm off the Panem press! As fans of Suzanne Collins’ wildly popular win-or-die YA book series will be well aware, last month saw the release of Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping, a fresh prequel novel centred around fan-favourite District 12 tribute-turned-mentor Haymitch Abernathy. Now, with Games filmmaking veteran Francis Lawrence’s cinematic take on the book just over a year and a half away, this week we’ve been learning who’ll be volunteering as tribute for the franchise’s latest massive screen outing.

Toplining the Billy Ray written movie will be Ghostbusters: Afterlife and soon-to-be Scream 7 star McKenna Grace, electrifying up-and-comer Joseph Zada, and Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina series regular Whitney Peak. Grace, who’s been collecting franchise roles of slow with gigs on the aforementioned Ghostbusters legacyquels, Kevin Williamson’s upcoming slasher, and animated show Batman: Caped Crusader, is set to play Haymitch’s fellow District 12 tribute Maysilee Donner in the movie, which is set 24 years before Katniss took to the arena and in a Quarter Quell year — aka, a particularly effed-up special edition of the televised kid-killathon with added sadistic twists thrown in at the Capitol’s leisure.

Playing Haymitch, brought memorably to life on screen before by Woody Harrelson in the mainline Hunger Games movies, will be Zada. A relative unknown, Zada has just wrapped shooting on Zoe Kazan’s East Of Eden confined series, in which he’ll be playing Cal Trask, the role James Dean made notable in Elia Kazan’s feted 1955 movie. And featuring alongside Grace’s Katniss-like Maysilee and Zada’s Haymitch will be Peak’s Lenore Dove Baird, an antecedent of Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray Baird from The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes and Haymitch’s girlfriend at the time of this story’s 50th annual Hunger Games setting.

While reviews of The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes, a biopic style origin tale for the Hunger Games’ massive bad Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), were somewhat mixed, the movie’s robust $349 million showing at the global box office proved there’s plenty of life in Collins’ surprisingly brutal and politically astute dystopian saga yet. And with these buzzy first castings for a movie that’s set to dig deeper into one of the books and movies’ best characters now locked in, we’re more than ready to volunteer as tributes… to go to the nearest multiplex on 20 November, 2026 when Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping releases. *Raises three-finger salute and whistles the Mockingjay theme*