Viola Davis is featured in a prominent role in the upcoming “Hunger Games” prequel, and her casting was the result of some fan art of the Oscar-winning actress that went viral.
Last year, Davis shared the fan art from artist Rico Knight with her Instagram followers, in which an image of her — presumably from “The Help” — had been photoshopped front of a window, with “RIP” written in blood seen on the sidewalk, while a blood-spattered Davis sports a sinister grin.
“I was like, ‘Wow, you know what? She may be really good for this.’”
“Wowzers!! I’d love to lead a horror movie! Drop your plot ideas in the comments,” Davis wrote in the caption for the post, which quickly went viral.
According to Francis Lawrence, director of the upcoming “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” the viral image caught his attention.
“It was a piece of fan art, and somebody had photoshopped, I think, an image of her standing by a window,” Lawrence told Entertainment Weekly.
“It may be a still from ‘The Help’, but she had this sort of sinister little smile and they had made mocked up a fake horror poster as if she was the villain in this,” he continued.
“I was like, ‘Wow, you know what? She may be really good for this,’” he says of his reaction to the meme (above). “She has this gravitas, but she could be playful and quirky and get all of that. It’d be very different for her. I don’t think we’ve seen her do this kind of thing a lot.”
As a result, Lawrence cast Davis as Volumnia Gaul, gamemaker of the 10th Hunger Games, in which future president Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, portraying a younger version of the role Donald Sutherland played in the earlier films) competes.
“We wanted to create a very different kind of character in terms of powerful women in these stories,” Lawrence said, describing the character a “very strong believer in a specific philosophy and is grooming Snow in that direction,” he says.
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While he sees Gaul as having a “sinister underpinning,” he’s never viewed the villains in his movies as such.
“Even going back to Donald playing Snow, a lot of people would say that he’s villainous and evil, but Donald and I never really thought of him that way,” he said.
“I know objectively the character is, but these characters have to believe in their philosophies. And so she’s a real believer in a specific philosophy. She truly believes that at our core, humans are savage, and that’s why we need the games. That’s why people need to be ruled with an iron fist,” he added.
“So if that’s somebody that believes those things, then they create the things they create. She’s passionate and this is why she’s trying to rejuvenate the games. The slightly twisted thing is that she finds joy and creativity in designing the games and making them more entertaining, so she’s truly the first real gamemaker to think outside the box,” he said.
“She’s a creative person with a very sinister underpinning,” Lawrence added, so “there’s a lot of colour in her wardrobe and in her hair and also in her creation.”
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” hits theatres Nov. 17.