‘The Hunger Games’ Star Rachel Zegler Recalls Meeting Jennifer Lawrence Jokingly Wanting To Strangle Her For Photo

Rachel Zegler stars in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and recently recalled an encounter she had with OG star Jennifer Lawrence.

While making an appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Zegler opened up about meeting Lawrence during the Christian Dior runway show at Paris Fashion Week.

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“I didn’t want to be weird. I was just kind of psyching myself up to talk to her. She was so unbelievably kind,” Zegler said of being the only cast member of the prequel film to have met Lawrence.

From that encounter, a photo of Zegler and Lawrence went viral and the West Side Story alum explained what was really going on in the image.

“In that clip, [Jennifer is] actually saying, ‘Let’s do another photo where I’m strangling you and saying you’ll never take my part!’ And that’s exactly what I wanted from her,” Zegler explained.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel to The Hunger Games saga and takes place 64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute, and decades before Coriolanus Snow became the tyrannical president of Panem.

Tom Blyth, Peter Dinklage, Hunter Schafer, Josh Andrés Rivera, Jason Schwartzman and Viola Davis star alongside Zegler.

According to the film’s official description, the film “follows a young Coriolanus (Blyth) who is the last hope for his failing lineage, the once-proud Snow family that has fallen from grace in a post-war Capitol. With his livelihood threatened, Snow is reluctantly assigned to mentor Lucy Gray Baird, a tribute from the impoverished District 12.”

Francis Lawrence directs the film from a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, and produced by Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, and Francis Lawrence.

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