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Joseph Zada was up against some fierce competition to land the role of young Haymitch Abernathy in the upcoming Hunger Games prequel movie.
The 20-year-old Australian actor was cast in the role, which was played by Woody Harrelson in the original films, in April. By the time the announcement was made about his casting, it had been some time since he was in the audition room, as his We Were Liars costar Emily Alyn Lind tells PEOPLE.
“So, I was FaceTiming him because he was like, ‘I’m in L.A.’ And I’m like, ‘What are you doing in L.A., loser? Let’s hang out,’ ” she recalls. “And I FaceTime him and he is at this hotel and he’s being Joe. And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m out here. You can’t tell anyone but it’s down to me and a couple [other] people for this Hunger Games thing.’ ”
“And I was like, ‘Oh, no f—— way. That’s so sick,’ ” Lind remembers. “And he’s naming names that are really big that he’s up against.”
Despite the “really big” names he was up against for the role, Lind says she knew Zada would get the part. “I’m like, ‘You’ll get it, because you’re you.’ ”
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“He just gets what he wants,” she says of Zada, who is now starring as the Johnny to her Cadence Sinclair in the new Prime Video series adapted from E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, and will next be seen in Sunrise on the Reaping. “He is going to be one of these guys.”
“When I met Joe, I was just like, he has that thing. And I’ve seen so many kids go in and out of the doors and they have the thing or they don’t have the thing, and he has the thing. He’s going to be the kid that blows up and I’m so happy for him.”
That x-factor that Lind says her costar has is something that the Australian actor knows about himself, too.
“That’s what I’ll tell you. He knew it too,” she says. “We were in Lunenburg, where we shot [We Were Liars], where its population is 1,000, we were hours away from anything. We’re all staying next door to each other. And I’m like, ‘Let’s go walk down to the pub.’ “
On the walk, Lind — who scored her first major role at age 5 in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void — remembers Zada “telling me about his five-year-to-10-year goals and what’s going to happen.”
The predictions were lofty, but she bought it. “I looked at him, I’m like, ‘I believe you actually.’ ”
“And it’s going to work out for him. He takes his job very seriously. And I think all the girls are going to be obsessed with him.”
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We Were Liars is now streaming on Prime Video and Sunrise on the Reaping will hit theaters in November 2026.
