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

Malone recalled to 'Variety' that Lawrence was sick the day she shot the naked elevator scene, which also included Josh Hutcherson and Woody Harrelson

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

Speaking with Variety on Monday at the Los Angeles premiere of The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the 38-year-old actress said that Lawrence was not feeling well the day she shot the sequence that introduced her bold character Johanna Mason in the 2013 film.

In the scene, Lawrence's character, Katniss Everdeen, takes an elevator ride with Johanna, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) — where Johanna strips down 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, and so there wasn't a lot of people in the elevator," Malone recalled. "So I think we were just winging it and trying to get as much as we could get, 'cause it was [shot] in a real hotel."

"But, you know, that's the magic of filmmaking, is you only need a few seconds to really create something that lasts," she added.

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Related: Jennifer Lawrence Likely Won't Return to Hunger Games, Says Producer: 'I Think Her Story Is Complete'

Malone also told Variety that she was "excited" to see The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, especially since she hasn't read Suzanne Collins' 2020 prequel book of the same name.

The new movie follows an 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (played by Donald Sutherland in the original series and in the new film by Tom Blyth), who would eventually rise to become the tyrannical president of Panem.

Also among the cast are Rachel Zegler, Hunter Schafer, Peter Dinklage, Viola Davis, Jason Schwartzman and Josh Andrés Rivera.

"I'm gonna go in with fresh eyes and see what they have to say," Malone said. "The Hunger Games is obviously a very intense, wildly heavy thing — I mean, we use the genre of fantasy to explore the things that are very hard for us to explore in our own life."

"But really, if you look at our reality right now, there's a lot of mirroring," she continued. "So I think it's important to see where this younger generation is gonna take this film, and push it and run with it, and hopefully change the world."

Related: 17 Actors Who Were Almost in The Hunger Games

As for Malone's character, while Johanna gets fully nude in the scene where she is introduced, the actress told Vulture in November 2013 that "it was too complicated" for her to do the same.

"My costume, taking the entire thing off, including the shoes, would have taken me 30 minutes. So we were able to make it look like I was getting naked, but it was a little too complicated to do that," she said at the time. "We would have needed like a 500-story elevator, someone working the buckles of my shoes."

Asked about how Lawrence, Harrelson, 62, and Hutcherson, 31, reacted in the scene, Malone told the outlet, "I mean, I kind of came in like a whirlwind, so I couldn’t help but maybe own it, so I felt like maybe they were a little bit less in their energy and being more respectful to mine."

"Because I had to do this complicated, seven-second striptease in an elevator that was in a real hotel with real people around," she continued. "This one time, just when I’m like, 'Okay, thanks, let’s do it again sometime,' the doors open, there I am naked, and there’s a guy holding four coffee cups in a little to-go thing, trying to get in on the elevator."

"I was like, Uh, this is the most awkward moment of my life," Malone added. "I think I literally fell down and was just rolling around on the ground laughing."

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

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