NEED TO KNOW
Glenn Close, is that really you?
The actress, 78, appears completely unrecognizable in the first trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, a sequel to 2023’s The Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and prequel to the hit franchise that launched Jennifer Lawrence to superstardom in 2012.
In the dystopian tale set in a world where children are chosen by lottery to fight to the death in a televised spectacle, Close plays Drusilla Sickle, a sinister Hunger Games official.
The trailer shows the eight-time Oscar nominee sporting an orange bob with severe bangs, bright red lipstick and arched eyebrows as she ushers in the reaping — or selecting of tributes — in fictional Panem’s District 12.
Lionsgate Movies/YouTube
“I just think of character stuff as really fun,” she recently told Entertainment Tonight. “I’m doing The Hunger Games now and that’s another amazing collaboration I’m having fun with.”
She added to Variety about the “huge” new movie, “There’s all these extras and helicopters and chariots and horses.”
According to an official release, the upcoming film, “revisits the world of Panem and follows young Haymitch Abernathy (Joseph Zada) twenty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Fiftieth Hunger Games, also known as the Second Quarter Quell.”
Savion Washington/WireImage
Sunrise on the Reaping also stars Jesse Plemons, Ralph Fiennes, Kieran Culkin, Elle Fanning, Mckenna Grace, Maya Hawke, Whitney Peak and Kelvin Harrison Jr.
Close is no stranger to disappearing into roles. In 2011’s Albert Knobs, Close played a woman passing as a male butler in 19th century Ireland.
Patrick Redmond/Roadside Attractions
And in 2024’s horror movie The Deliverance, she played a chain-smoking grandma with a penchant for tight clothes and younger men.
Aaron Ricketts/Netflix
Fans will have to wait a year to see Close in Sunrise on the Reaping, which premieres in theaters on Nov. 20, 2026.
But in the meantime, the Fatal Attraction icon can be seen in Hulu’s campy legal drama All’s Fair and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third installment of writer-director Rian Johnson’s murder mysteries about whip-smart detective Benoit Blanc.
Set in a small town in upstate New York, Wake Up Dead Man stars close as Margaret Delacroix, the manager of a church and close ally of fiery monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), who’s murdered during an Easter Week service.
John Wilson/Netflix
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Last year, Close explained to PEOPLE that she liked to play all different types of women.
“If I have any rule that I’ve tried to hold myself to [it’s] never to repeat myself. Just for my own sake,” she said with a laugh. “I think I’d get bored.”
