The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Star Talks Rachel Zegler and Cast Rivalries

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is getting a physical media release next week, so ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with some of the movie's actors. We spoke with Nick Benson, who plays Jessup, the boy tribute from District 12 who is called during the Reaping alongside Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray Baird. Benson opened up about how he prepared for the role, and even shared his hopes for the future. The Hunger Games prequel focuses not only on the tributes in the games but their mentors. During our chat with Benson, he shared a funny story about working with Zegler and revealed if there were any good-natured behind-the-scenes rivalries between the mentors and tributes. 

"One of the first, because it was one of the first things that happened when we were filming," Benson began when asked if he had any fun stories about working with Zegler. "But when we were doing the arena and I was chasing her, and she's wearing that beautiful dress ... Well, not so beautiful in the arena because it's dirty. But she's wearing that dress in the arena. So I remember one of the takes we were going and it was me chasing after her, and they were like, 'And action.' And she goes, and then she just falls and trips over her dress and the tape started. I was like, 'Oh, are you okay.' But we were laughing. We were like, 'All right, well, we'll take that again.' It was a moment of levity in the quite heavy, intense scene. But since that was one of our first scenes, that's always a moment that sticks out to me." 

"A little bit because we filmed our game stuff in Poland before the mentors even came," Benson added when asked about any fun cast rivalries. "Once we finished that and then the mentors came and we had to film our few scenes there, it was cool to just bond with them and be like, 'Oh, the worlds are colliding finally.' And they'd be like friendly rivalry and jokes and be like, 'Oh, the mentors are all the cool ones, and they have all their clean costumes and the tributes are literally rolling around in the dirt.' It was just very funny, the juxtaposition of the experiences that we had, for sure."

Stay tuned for more from our interviews with the cast of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, which is being released on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD on February 13th.