REVEALED: Donald Sutherland’s powerful letter that convinced The Hunger Games director to cast him in iconic role as President Snow

Hollywood icon Donald Sutherland was known for several roles throughout his vast 60-year career, but there’s one role he specifically campaigned for: his role in The Hunger Games.

The actor, whose death at the age of 88 was confirmed Thursday by son Kiefer Sutherland, already had a long list of iconic credits by the time he played President Coriolanus Snow.

But few people know that he actually reached out and pitched himself to director Gary Ross.

Based on the best-selling novels by Suzanne Collins, the four-part film franchise is set in a dystopian future, with North America split into twelve districts and run by the rich and powerful who live in the Capitol of Panem – ruled by the tyrannical dictator. Chairman Snow.

Every year, the Capitol forces each district to select a boy and a girl, called Tributes, to participate in a nationally televised event called the Hunger Games. Donald starred in the film alongside Jennifer Lawrence, who played protagonist Katniss Everdeen.

He starred in the film alongside Jennifer Lawrence, who played lead character Katniss Everdeen (pictured)

After reading the script, Donald was attracted to the role and wrote a three-page letter to Ross, explaining why he wanted to play a role.

‘No one asked me to do it. It wasn’t offered to me. I love reading scripts and it captured my passion. I wrote them a letter,’ Donald explained to GC in a 2014 interview.

He admitted that he had not initially read the books – in fact, he was “unaware of them” – but felt he could work with Ross to accurately portray President Snow and give him a new perspective that the books did not offer.

“The president’s role may have had a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn’t make any difference. “I thought it was an incredibly important film and I wanted to be a part of it,” he explained.

Donald continued to say he thought he could “awaken an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s.”

“They showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it would be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they shaped the spirit and humor of Coriolanus Snow,” he said.

The letter, sent via email, was featured on the 2012 DVD release of The Hunger Games, in a segment titled Letters from the Rose Garden, where Ross spoke about his and Donald’s working experience.

“That’s the relationship you want from an actor and director, where there’s a give and take,” Ross explained on the DVD.

He continued, “It’s a collaboration. It’s one person offering something to another, who then takes it, extrapolates it, runs with it, gives it back to the actor who gives the scene back to me… that’s the way filmmaking works best.”

The actor, who has died aged 88, already had a long list of iconic credits by the time he played President Coriolanus Snow.

Donald (pictured in 2017) told Ross that he felt they could work together to accurately portray President Snow and give him a new perspective that the books did not provide

Read Donald’s full letter below:

Dear Gary Ross:

Current. That’s what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies that seek to maintain control and possession of that power?

Power commits war and oppression to perpetuate itself until it eventually collapses under the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.

Power corrupts, and in many cases absolute power really makes you horny. Clinton, Chirac, Mao, Mitterrand.

I don’t think that is the case with Coriolanus Snow. His obsession, his passion, is his rose garden. There is a rose called Sterling Silver which is lilac in color and has the most extraordinarily powerful scent – ​​incredibly beautiful – I loved it in the 1970s when it first appeared. Since then they have made many offshoots of it.

I didn’t want to write to you until I had read the trilogy and now the time has come: roses are of great importance. And the eyes of Coriolanus. And his smile. These three elements are alive and essential in Snow. Everything else is generally completely silent and ruthlessly contained. How happy she is [Katniss] gives him. He knows her so perfectly. Nothing, absolutely nothing, surprises him. He sees and understands everything. He was most likely a brilliant man who had succumbed to the siren song of power.

How will you dramatize the inner story in Katniss’ head that describes and consistently updates her relationship with the President, who is omnipresent in her mind? With omniscient calm he knows her perfectly. She knows he does and she knows he will do whatever it takes to maintain his power because she knows he believes she is a real threat to his fragile hold on his control of that power. She is more dangerous than Joan of Arc.

Donald co-starred with Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games (pictured in 2012)

Her inner dialogue/monologue defines Snow. It’s that old theatrical turnip: you can’t ‘play’ a king, you need everyone else on stage saying to each other, and therefore to the audience, things like: “There goes the king, isn’t he a piece of work, how bad , how sweet, how benevolent, how cruel, how brilliant he is!” The idea of ​​him, the definition of him, the audience’s perception of him, is instilled primarily through the observations of others and once that idea is established, the audience’s view of the character is virtually unyielding. And in Snow’s case, that definition comes from Katniss, of course.

Evil resembles our understanding of the history of the men we are looking at. It’s not what we see: it’s what we’ve been led to believe. Simple as that. Look at Ted Bundy’s face before you knew what he did and after you knew it.

Snow doesn’t look bad for the people of Panem’s Capitol. Bundy didn’t look bad to those girls. My wife and I were driving through Colorado when he escaped from prison there. The car radio warning was constant. ‘Don’t pick up young men. The escapee looks like the nicest young man you could imagine.” Snow’s evil emerges in the form of the smug, confident menace that is always present in his eyes. His determined silence. Have you seen a movie I made years ago? ‘The eye of the needle’. That guy had something of what I’m looking for.

The woman who lived down the street from us in Brentwood came to ask my wife a question when my wife dropped the kids off at school. This woman and her husband had seen that movie the night before and what she wanted to know was how my wife could live with someone who could play such a bad man. It made for an entertaining dinner or two, but part of my wife still wonders.

I would like to speak with you whenever you have the opportunity so that I can be on the same page with you.

They all end the same way. Welcome to Florida, have a nice day!