If you've ever seen a single episode of HBO's Euphoria, you know the actors do not channel rainbows and butterflies. But according to Hunter Schafer, who plays Jules on the dark, gritty, and often hard to watch series, her role as Tigris in the new The Hunger Games prequel movie The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes was actually more challenging.
According to Schafer, playing Tigris was quite a large departure from playing Jules; Schafer says she has more in common with her Euphoria character.
“Tigris kind of feels like the first character piece I've really done that's not like a teenage girl who is kind of like one step away from who I am,” the actor told ET on the red carpet of the movie's premiere. "It was like a challenge for me." Schafer had never acted before landing the role of Jules on Euphoria, so The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is her first big chance to transform into someone way outside her comfort zone — and in a mega-successful franchise film, at that.
In the prequel, Schafer plays Tigris, cousin of future Panem president Coriolanus Snow. She works as a stylist and struggles with her emotions regarding the Games. Tigris appears in both The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes — which takes place during the 10th Games — and later as an elderly woman in Mockingjay. By that time, she has transformed into a feline entity; like many others in the Capitol, she's used surgery to turn herself into an unrecognizable, opulent figure, but despite her relation to Snow, she has a good heart and proves to be an essential help to Katniss.
Hunter Schafer herself was a big Hunger Games fan during the original trilogy's debut in the 2010s. "I was a huge fan when I was in middle school... to the point where I was like doing fan art and I had the Mockingjay pin," Schafer told ET. “It means the world to me that I got to kind of contribute in some way.”
