Mackenzie Lansing found her death scene in 'The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes' "liberating".
Mackenzie Lansing enjoyed her death scene in The Hunger Games prequel
The actress played the role of female tribute Coral in the dystopian prequel but met her end after being engulfed by mutant snakes and found it freeing as she had complete control over the scene.
In an interview with ComicBook.com, Mackenzie said: "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. 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."
Coral's weapon of choice in the film is a trident and Mackenzie revealed the painstaking preparation that went into mastering the use of the three-pronged spear.
She said: "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."
Lansing added: "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."