Donald Sutherland’s film career is filled with some of the most incredible works of our time, spanning from dramas to conspiracy thrillers to even dystopian YA fiction like The Hunger Games. Sutherland landed the role of President Snow in quite a peculiar manner, which he detailed in an interview with GQ.
President Snow was the nefarious leader of Panem in The Hunger Games, one who popularized the Hunger Games in the Capital. The character was not offered to Sutherland, nor did he audition for the role, but Sutherland was sure that he could do the role justice, and that he would be the perfect President Snow for the film.
Donald Sutherland sent a letter to Gary Ross
Gary Ross was the director responsible for the first Hunger Games film and was also the creative to receive the email from Donald Sutherland. Speaking with GQ, Sutherland talked about how he thought he was great for the role and ended up sending a letter to Gary Ross to get the role. He said:
Nobody asked me to do it. I wasn’t offered it. I like to read scripts, and it captured my passion. I wrote them a letter. The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn’t make any difference. I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it.
Sutherland was keenly aware of the problems that the film wished to tackle and was ready to survey the film against its political backdrop in preparation for the character. Sutherland considered the film to be important and was equipped to play President Snow, given his filmography dealing with politics and conspiracies.
Donald Sutherland thought the film would be able to do some real-life activism
Sutherland’s views on the plot and story of The Hunger Games were largely positive, and he believed that some real-world good could happen from these films. According to him:
I thought it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s. I hadn’t read the books. To be truthful, I was unaware of them.
But they showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they formed the mind and wit of Coriolanus Snow.
Despite not having read them, Sutherland was sure that the story that the IP wanted to tell was very important, given how divisive politics has begun to become thanks to the internet becoming more widely available in not just America, but also around the world.
Sutherland’s portrayal of President Snow remained some of the best scenes in the four Hunger Games films, which might have not ended well, but was still one of Lionsgate’s most successful franchises.
