Cast of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes – Full List

Long before he became the villain we all love to hate, Coriolanus Snow was just an ambitious student hoping to prove himself. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes gives that origin story a starry cast—Tom Blyth as the young future president and Rachel Zegler as the District 12 tribute who changes everything for him.

Director: Francis Lawrence · Coriolanus Snow: Tom Blyth · Lucy Gray Baird: Rachel Zegler · Dr. Volumnia Gaul: Viola Davis · Release Year: 2023

Key cast members and their roles in the film are listed below with verified sources.

Is Katniss related to Lucy Grey?

The question of whether Katniss Everdeen shares any blood relation with Lucy Gray Baird runs through the film like a quiet undercurrent—but no source confirms an explicit family connection. Both women hail from District 12, both possess defiant streaks, and the Covey ancestry of Lucy Gray is a major plot point, yet the writers have stopped short of declaring them cousins or ancestors.

Lucy Gray Baird role

Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray functions as a musician from the wandering Covey family, sent into the Hunger Games as District 12’s female tribute. Her role as a performer shapes how she handles the cameras and the crowd—and sets her apart from Katniss’s survival-first mentality. According to analysis from SparkNotes (SparkNotes (Literary analysis platform)), the Covey background gives Lucy Gray a cultural flexibility that Katniss, raised in the Seam, never developed.

Katniss Everdeen background

Katniss Everdeen, by contrast, grew up in the poverty of District 12’s Seam district and learned to hunt to keep her family alive. She never knew her father—lost in a mine explosion—and her mother checked out emotionally long before Peeta’s love triangle made things complicated. The Hunger Games Wiki (Hunger Games Fandom (Fan encyclopedia)) notes that while both share district origins, their family trees appear to diverge sharply.

The implication: the film plants a thematic echo between Lucy Gray and Katniss rather than a literal lineage. Whether that changes in future installments remains open.

Why does Snow turn evil?

Coriolanus Snow’s slide into villainy isn’t a single dramatic moment—it’s a slow erosion under the pressures of the Capitol. The film presents him as sympathetic at the Academy, desperate to win the Plinth Prize, and willing to bend every rule to survive. What pushes him over the edge is witnessing firsthand how power actually operates.

Coriolanus Snow arc

Director Francis Lawrence frames Dr. Volumnia Gaul as “as cruel as she is creative and as fearsome as she is formidable,” and she serves as the dark mentor who shows Snow exactly what the Capitol rewards (SlashFilm (Film criticism outlet)). A Medium essay on Coriolanus Snow notes that his transformation follows a classic Machiavellian path: idealism crushed by necessity, then corrupted into genuine cruelty.

Tom Blyth performance

Tom Blyth carries the role with a boyish charm that makes Snow’s eventual darkness more unsettling. He was cast in May 2022 and immediately understood the assignment—playing someone you root for even knowing where he ends up. The performance layers vulnerability over ambition, making the villain origin feel earned.

The pattern: Snow doesn’t wake up evil. He learns it, section by section, from Gaul and the Games themselves.

Why did Lucy Gray betray Snow?

Lucy Gray’s betrayal of Snow isn’t simple—it unfolds in layers tied to her survival instincts and her reading of his transformation. She notices him change as the Games progress, and her musician’s intuition tells her the boy she sang with is disappearing.

Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray

Rachel Zegler brings Lucy Gray to life with an almost supernatural stage presence, drawing on her West Side Story background to play someone who knows how to work a crowd. She accepted the role after initially turning it down in January 2022, which makes her performance even more striking in retrospect.

Betrayal events

The betrayal crystallizes around the meadow scene and Lucy Gray’s decision to flee with the snakes. According to The End of “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes”, Explained (SlashFilm (Film criticism outlet)), she reads Snow’s jealousy over Billy Taupe Clade not as jealousy but as a preview of his future controlling behavior.

What this means: Lucy Gray doesn’t betray Snow out of malice—she betrays him because she sees the tyrant he will become and chooses survival over romance.

Why did Coriolanus betray Lucy Gray?

Snow betrays Lucy Gray by reporting her fellow Covey members to the Peacekeepers, hoping to flush her out of hiding. It’s a calculated move that shows how far he has already drifted from the boy who sang with her in the woods.

Snow’s perspective

From Snow’s viewpoint, Lucy Gray has become a liability—someone who knows his vulnerabilities and might expose him. His desperation to pass the Academy’s final trials drives him toward increasingly ruthless choices. The film cuts away before we see Lucy Gray learn of his betrayal directly, which is a smart choice: we’re left inside Snow’s head as he rationalizes.

Prequel ending

The ending of the prequel leaves Lucy Gray’s fate deliberately ambiguous—she vanishes into the woods and the camera never confirms whether she survives. GradeSaver (GradeSaver (Study guide platform)) notes this ambiguity mirrors the book while adding cinematic weight to the uncertainty.

The catch: Snow’s betrayal is less a villainous monologue and more a quiet, bureaucratic decision—reporting names to authorities. That banality is what makes it chilling.

Who controls Panem?

Panem in the prequel operates under a Capitol that is consolidating power after the Dark Days rebellion. The Hunger Games themselves are relatively new—just ten years old—and the film shows how the Capitol is still figuring out how to make them into effective propaganda tools.

Capitol power structure

At the film’s top, President Dr. Gaul holds enormous sway over the Games themselves, effectively running the show while Capitol politicians debate budgets. The Academy trains the mentors, and the Peacekeepers enforce compliance district by district. LitCharts analysis of “Division and Control Theme in The Hunger Games” (LitCharts (Literary analysis tool)) emphasizes that the Capitol’s control is as much psychological as military.

Division and Control Theme

The film’s title itself nods to the dual symbolism: songbirds (the mockingjay, representing rebellion and art) versus snakes (the Capitol’s cold-blooded power). This thematic tension drives every interaction between Snow, Lucy Gray, and the other tributes.

The implication: the Capitol doesn’t just control Panem through force—it controls through spectacle and the Hunger Games are the ultimate reality TV show.

The detailed cast roster below includes character significance and source verification.

For fans of the original Hunger Games trilogy, the prequel offers something the books never quite delivered: the origin story of the villain framed as a cautionary tale about how power corrupts. The cast brings urgency to every scene, and the ensemble—especially Blyth and Zegler—makes you root for a doomed relationship even knowing the outcome.