The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Star Talks Their Big Death Scene and Weapons Training

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is now available to buy on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD. In honor of the prequel film's physical media release, ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with some of the movie's stars. We spoke with Mackenzie Lansing, who plays Coral, the fierce tribute from District 4 who ends up being Lucy Gray Baird's (Rachel Zegler) biggest adversary in the arena. Being from a district known for fishing, Coral's weapon of choice is a trident, which she uses throughout the film. Warning: Spoilers Ahead! Coral ends up being the last tribute to die after Dr. Gaul (Viola Davis) sends her mutant snakes into the arena. We asked Lansing about filming her big death scene and training to use the trident.

"So, I love talking about this," Lansing said of being engulfed by snakes in the film. "I've been on other sets before where you're wearing a suit with dots. I did a movie also called The Creator, where I was attacked by a robot, and so there's a guy in a blue suit. What was really special about this is there was nothing, and you can think that that's kind of terrifying, but actually it was the most liberating experience as an actor because there were no instructions."

"I got to decide how quickly the snakes move," Lansing explained. "Every actor got to decide how they're responding to the poison, how quickly it affects them, does it slur their words? And of course, we're all kind of on the same page on what it does, but just like anything else, it's going to affect people differently. So, any time you see me rip a snake off, that's like, 'Oh, I decided that there's a snake here,' and so I think that that was one of the most exciting things is we got to make those choices as actors." 

"It was around two months and we did the big fight scene where we all rush for the weapons," Lansing added when asked about working with the trident. "We would start the day warming up with that because very much to make it go smoothly and also just for it to be very realistic for everybody, we wanted to be able to do that scene without stopping, so they could do one take if necessary. So, especially when you see the drone shots and everything, we just went through the entire battle, which meant run for weapon, dodge, roll over your back, another person comes. So, you had to prepare for the entire fight, which was kind of a first sort in The Hunger Games, which was very cool."

"But then in terms of the trident specifically, after that, we would break off and I would spend hours a day sort of throwing my trident around, doing trident choreography, and it was really cool to learn this new skill and be sort of stretched that way. And it became, to me, a very important part of actually getting into character," Lansing continued. 

"We had so many different tridents," she added. "So, the trick was I had to practice with different ones and be able to adjust according to the weight of the trident to make it look the same no matter which one it was, because obviously if I'm in a scene where it's pretty static, it's like a full trident with points. If I'm stabbing someone with it, then it's got the foamy bits on the end. So there was a lot of like, 'Okay, today's a lighter trident, I'm going to practice throwing it around my back and make sure that it doesn't fly off into the air.' Or when we did the interview scene, which most of it didn't make it into the movie, but the interview scene with Lucky Flickerman, that was a real one that was very heavy. So, I had to make sure that I'm putting my full body into it to move it around."

Stay tuned for more from our interviews with the cast of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. You can watch our interview with Mackenzie Lansing at the top of the page.