Hunger Games aficionados rejoice: Rachel Zegler and Jennifer Lawrence just had a trans-generational District 12 meetup during Paris Fashion Week.
When the Panem universe collides, am I right? Jennifer Lawrence famously played the leading role of Katniss Everdeen in the original Hunger Games film franchise, which spanned four movies from 2012 to 2015. Rachel Zegler, on the other hand, stars in the franchise’s next leading role as Lucy Gray Baird in the upcoming prequel film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, based on Suzanne Collins’s 2020 controversial novel.
Zegler and Lawrence met during Dior’s spring-summer 2024 show at PFW. Unfortunately, the two did not get to sit side by side during the actual show, as other A-listers like Rosalía, Jenna Ortega, and Anya-Taylor Joy sat in between them.
However, despite having separated spots, Zegler and Lawarence did take a chance to snap a few pictures together to mark the occasion before taking their final seats — and we’re pretty sure Zegler was more than stoked about it.
The West Side Story and Snow White actress made sure to share her excitement on social media for the whole world to see. “A mother to many. A mother to Me,” the 22-year-old captioned a post on X, which included a behind-the-scenes video of her and Lawrence posing and laughing together. “She’s actual mother,” Zegler doubled down on Instagram Stories.
While they might look like birds of a feather at PFW, don’t expect Zegler and Lawrence’s characters to be so similar when The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes hits our screens on November 17.
Related: The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Trailer Has a Hidden Easter Egg
The film’s director, Francis Lawrence, who also directed all of the original Hunger Games movies minus the first one, described Zegler’s character as the “anti-Katniss” in a recent interview with Empire. “Katniss was an introvert and a survivor,” the director told the publication. “She was quite quiet and stoic […] Lucy Gray is the opposite. She wears her sexuality on her sleeve, [and] she really is a performer.”
Producer Lucy Jacobson echoed this sentiment in an interview with Variety earlier this year. “[Lucy is] such a performer. Katniss is the opposite,” she explained. “To see the connection there, the history that she represents, and to think that Katniss Everdeen grew up knowing about Lucy Gray and this moment, it was just a great kind of microcosm of both how much of a new ground it is and how rooted it is in what we’ve seen, but in this backward-looking way.”
