Despite her celebrity status and starring role in the movie, there's still one thing that Elizabeth Banks has in common with every other "Hunger Games" fan: She's dying (dying!) to see the finished product on the big screen. And when we sat down to chat with her about the scenes she's most excited to see come to life, her answer was the same as everyone's:
"I'm really excited to see the actual Games," she gushed.
Yes, Elizabeth Banks wants to see the armed and dangerous tributes tearing each other limb from limb just as much as the rest of us do...but, you know, not out of psychotic bloodlust or anything. Instead, Elizabeth described the character-driven importance of the whole arena scene—and noted that, in the context of the Games, even the "bad guys" have their own complex emotional journey to take.
"I'm really excited to see how that all plays out," she said.
And what are the scenes of her own that she can't wait to see in their final form?
"The Reaping, for sure," she said. "The Reaping is amazing. We get to see a heroine step forward and show herself for the first time."
Not to mention that Elizabeth is wearing one of the most interesting of her weird and wonderful Effie Trinket costumes during said scene—which our fashion-hungry fandom can't wait to scope out in painstaking detail. And based on Elizabeth's description, it sounds like a lot of the film's actors will be excited to see the Reaping...even the ones who were, technically, already in attendance.
"It was a really remarkable scene to shoot, and it was a really difficult scene to shoot," Elizabeth said, going on to explain that the Reaping was filmed on a day when the temperature soared to over 100 degrees. And for the extras called upon to play would-be tributes, the weather was bad news: "We had all these young kids there, just dropping like flies."
The good news? If you were an extra in "The Hunger Games", and you did pass out in a sweaty pile and miss the whole show, you've only got a month to wait before you can feast your eyes on whatever you didn't catch due to unconsciousness. Yay!
Which of Effie's scenes are you most excited to see when "The Hunger Games" hits theaters?
** Hollywood Crush Twitter