By 
Ralph Fiennes is one of the greatest actors of his generation. He started with the Royal Shakespeare Company and later won a Tony for playing Hamlet on Broadway. He’s been twice nominated for Best Actor and once for Best Supporting Actor by the Academy Awards, and has starred in some all-time great movies, including Schindler’s List, The English Patient, and The Grand Budapest Hotel. But for a certain generation of movie watchers, Fiennes is first and foremost Lord Voldemort, the evil wizard from the Harry Potter franchise.
With the first trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, Fiennes is ready to expand his legend among a certain type of book reader. The trailer heavily features the actor as Coriolanus Snow, the Panem president previously played by Donald Sutherland and Tom Blyth. And he promises to be the most terrifying take on the leader yet.
Fiennes is hardly the only new face with a familiar name. Based on the novel from last year, Sunrise on the Reaping bridges the gap between the mainline Hunger Games series and the 2023 prequel The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, in which a young Snow mentored Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) through the tournament.
As such, it is filled with new actors playing younger versions of characters we met in previous films. The trailer offers glimpses of Joseph Zada (looking a lot like Roger Daltrey, and not just because The Who’s “Love, Reign o’er Me” plays over the action) as a still-idealistic Haymitch Abernathy. Jesse Plemons takes the place of Philip Seymour Hoffman as future game designer Plutarch Heavensbee, while Kieran Culkin is already in fine mugging form as Caesar Flickerman, the role Stanley Tucci plays in later films. Equally well-suited is Elle Fanning as Effie Trinket, with all the energy that Elizabeth Banks gave the character.
We also see a trio of new actors playing tributes who appeared as grown adults in Catching Fire. Maya Hawke replaces Amanda Plummer as Wiress, Kelvin Harrison Jr. played the younger version of Jeffrey Wright’s Beetee Latier, and we briefly see Lili Taylor as Mags Flanagan, who Lynn Cohen played in the later movie.
Seeing these characters with fresh, hopeful faces only highlights the sense of dread the trailer invites. The characters all have the fire of revolution in their eyes, and even Plutarch Heavensbee, whom Hoffman played with exhaustion and resignation, seems to have more hope and spark.
Of course, we who have seen or read the mainline Hunger Games stories know that it all comes to naught. This resistance will fail, and won’t achieve anything close to its goals for another quarter-century, when Katniss Everdeen joins the Games. Yet, even those who don’t know the rest of the story can sense things will go badly just by watching Fiennes as Snow, thoroughly unimpressed with those who would stand against him.
Snow may not care about the young people who plot revolution, but Fiennes knows how to make even apathy look compelling. And that means a whole new generation of fans are about to learn why Ralph Fiennes is a legend.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping comes to theaters on November 20, 2026.
The post Hunger Games Prequel Trailer Features Ralph Fiennes as Another YA Novel Villain appeared first on Den of Geek.
