Philip Seymour Hoffman Lives On In ‘Hunger Games’

The clumsily-titled, critically-acclaimed The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 opens this week, and no doubt will put an arrow through all who dare to challenge it to mortal combat at the box office for the next two weeks. The first half of the final third of the YA-friendly kids-killing-kids dystopian trilogy is decidely depressing, with Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen looking glum and resentful of being used as a rebel propaganda tool, and her beau Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) looking equally glum as a Capitol propaganda tool. But the film has another reason for its somber feel: the presence of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch Heavensbee.

After Hoffman’s sudden death in February, there was concern as to how the movie would get around his scenes (he had several days of shooting left). Another director might have opted to use a double and some CGI trickery, but Francis Lawrence thought that would be “catastrophic,” and chose instead to rewrite Hoffman’s scenes and let other actors speak his lines. “He had two scenes with dialogue that were left and we decided we didn’t want to try any digital trickery with him,” Lawrence told Huffpost Live, “so we rewrote his scenes and gave the dialogue to other actors. I just think to try to fake a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance would have been catastrophic and I would never want to do that.” By all accounts it was a smart move: Vulture‘s David Edelstein writes of Hoffman’s performance: “Hoffman underplays peerlessly, layers of irony under layers of sincerity under layers of … something unfathomable. The sting of his loss will never fade.”