Jena Malone Reveals She and Jennifer Lawrence Filmed Their Hunger Games Elevator Scene Separately

Jena Malone reveals how Jennifer Lawrence was added to a famous scene in the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Talking to Diversity on Monday at the film’s premiere in Los Angeles The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and SnakesThe 38-year-old actress said Lawrence was not feeling well the day she filmed the sequence that introduced her plucky character Johanna Mason in the 2013 film.

In the scene, Lawrence’s character, Katniss Everdeen, rides in an elevator with Johanna, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) — where Johanna strips naked in front of them after lamenting, “My stylist is such an idiot.”

“Jen was sick that day, so I ended up doing it without Jen, so there weren’t a lot of people in the elevator,” Malone recalled. “So I think we just watched and tried to get as much as we could, because it was there [shot] in a real hotel.”

“But, you know, that’s the magic of filmmaking, you only need a few seconds to really create something that lasts,” she added.

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Woody Harrelson, Jena Malone, Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013).

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Malone also said Diversity that she was “excited” to see A ballad about songbirds and snakesespecially since she hasn’t read Suzanne Collins’ 2020 prequel book of the same name.

The new film follows 18-year-old Coriolan Snow (played by Donald Sutherland in the original series and Tom Blyth in the new film), who will eventually become the tyrannical president of Panem.

The cast also includes Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage, Viola Davis, Jason Schwartzman and Josh Andrés Rivera.

“I’m going to come in with fresh eyes and see what they have to say,” Malone said. “Hunger Games is obviously a very intense, wildly difficult thing — I mean, we use the fantasy genre to explore things that are very difficult for us to explore in our own lives.”

“But really, if you look at our reality now, there’s a lot of mirroring,” she continued. “So I think it’s important to see where this younger generation will take this movie, push it and run with it, and hopefully change the world.”

Jena Malone and Jennifer Lawrence in Hunger Games movies.

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As for the Malone character, while Johanna is completely nude in the scene in which she is introduced, the actress told Vulture in November 2013 that “it was too complicated” for her to do the same.

“For my costume, taking the whole thing off, including the shoes, would take me 30 minutes. So we were able to make it look like I was stripping naked, but it was a little too complicated for that,” she told Time. “We’d need a 500-story elevator, someone to buckle my shoes.”

Asked how Lawrence, Harrelson, 62, and Hutcherson, 31, reacted to the scene, Malone told the outlet, “I mean, I went in like a whirlwind, so I couldn’t help but maybe own it, so I felt I feel like maybe they are a little less in their energy and more respectful of mine.”

“Because I had to do this complicated seven-second strip in an elevator that was in a real hotel with real people,” she continued. “This time, just as I said, ‘Okay, thanks, let’s do it again,’ the door opens, I’m naked, and there’s a guy holding four cups of coffee in a little takeout, trying to get me into the elevator. ”

“I was, like, Ugh, this is the most embarrassing moment of my life.” Malone added. “I think I literally fell over and was just rolling on the ground laughing.”

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is in theaters on Friday.

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