Jena Malone on Johanna Mason & 'Catching Fire' in EW

Jena Malone is featured in this week's Entertainment Weekly. Check out why she almost quit acting and how she feels about her Catching Fire alter-ego, Johanna Mason.

From EW:

Of all the terrifying things in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - the jabberjays, the monkey mutts, Stanley Tucci's maniacal game-show-host grin - none are a match for Jena Malone. From the moment she steps on screen, defiantly stripping down in an elevator, the 29-year-old actress brings a feral intensity to Johanna Mason, a former victor dragged back into another death match alongside hero Katniss Everdeen.

"Once Jena auditioned, it was over," says franchise producer Nina Jacobson. "Jena has this quality where you don't want to be enemies with her, but at the same time you couldn't ask for anybody more fierce on your side." Her performance throbs with aggression. "Jena," says director Francis Lawrence, "was born to play somebody like Johanna."

Thanks to Catching Fire, Malone is finally enjoying a spotlight that's eluded her for close to two decades. She made her moving debut in 1996's Bastard Out of Carolina and has been a reliable supporting player ever since. In films like Stepmom, Donnie Darko, and Into The Wild, she showed a raw vulnerability at once deep and slightly dangerous. When Zack Snyder cast her in 2011's Sucker Punch, she seemed poised to break into more mainstream work. But the splashy girl-power flick flopped hard, and Malone's phone again went silent. "I was so primed for more, and then there were no parts," she says. " I was going to quit acting."

Instead of walking away for good, she took camping trips to Big Sur. And she threw herself into photography and her two-person electro-folk band The Shoe (with Lem Jay Ignacio), jerry-rigging an elaborate instrument out of an old trunk. "We used to just go and play on street corners with my generator," she says. "It's all just freestyle-based like Townes Van Zant or Tom Waits."

Malone had mostly give up reading scripts when she was approached about playing a ruthless Kentucky girl in the Kevin Costner TV miniseries Hatfields & McCoys. "She was like the Lady Macbeth of the West," Malone says of her character. "And I thought, 'Huh, I feel like I can really get into this [character's] physical body.' I think it was Hatfields that got me Catching Fire because I'd never played such an evil, feisty girl before. I've played dark girls with problems, bit most of them were innocent to their own destructive patterns." It's that lack of innocence that makes her Johanna Mason so wonderfully ferocious. And the actress is thrilled to have the chance to inspire Catching Fire's teenage-girl fan base to embrace their own power. "Why do I want to model fearlessness for? It's 14-15 year old girls. They're the true revolutionaries."

In it's $158.1 million opening weekend alone, Catching Fire made more than Malone's past 10 years' worth of movies. (The film has since earned $572.8 million worldwide.) She is well aware of the gift of exposure. "I could make the most incredible cake in the world, but if only my friends eat it, only my friends are going to know I'm a good baker," she says. "So hell, yes, this is a giant, massive moment." She's hoping the attention might jump-start a biopic of writer Carson McCullers: she's long been attached to star in the project, but it ha struggled to find financing. Meanwhile, on Dec. 2 she gratefully reported to the set of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1.

"I love this character. I would play her in an after school special."

Jennifer Lawrence Talks Life, Catching Fire and Celebrity With USA Today

Jennifer Lawrence has two articles in USA Today in which she talks about the price of fame, The Hunger Games franchise and being a mama-cat to her kittens, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth. 

Read on from USA Today:

Away from the awards-season hubbub, which again envelopes her for her role as a foxy yet foolish wife in American Hustle, Lawrence is a self-aware woman trying to have some version of a regular existence. "I've built my career. I need to build my human life. I need to get a house and connect to the people around me and not work for a little while," she says.

Topping her to-do list: buying a home when she wraps the two-part Hunger Games franchise finale, Mockingjay, which shoots until June.

But for now, she does her best to retain some sense of routine in an existence that's mostly lived in hotels, fueled by room service. Her on-again boyfriend, Nicholas Hoult, helps keep her sane, away from prying eyes. "We're really good at it," she says of maintaining their under-the-radar romance.

She's infatuated with her two young nephews, whom she FaceTimes every night. She decompresses by watching reality TV, in particular Keeping Up with the Kardashians. And she keeps her best-actress Oscar, won for last year's Silver Linings Playbook, at her mom's house to avoid any weirdness when friends come over, to try to nip in the bud the possibility of people standing at attention around her.

"I just get allergic to that kind of thing. People treating you differently when you don't feel any differently is really alienating. You can see, the way they look at you. I can see if that was who I surrounded myself with, that's why you change," she says. "I find people who don't change. That's where I get my reality."

And her ability to say exactly the right thing at the right time? It's a gift. "She's an amazing study of people. She really understands the teeniest differences in people. She can read people in a second," says The Hunger Games: Catching Fire director Francis Lawrence. "She can figure you out in an instant. She does it with such ease, from the gut."

Read more after the jump!

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Woody Harrelson Talks 'Catching Fire' With Forbes

Woody Harrelson spoke with Forbes while promoting Out Of The Furnace, but he snuck in some choice tidbits about Catching Fire along the way. From Forbes:

Having The Hunger Games as this ongoing series of films in your career, what sort of itch does Out of the Furnace scratch in comparison to that?

I mean, I don’t really compare them. I mean, it’s just – I turned Hunger Games down, twice! I’m the only one that’s such a fool to turn that thing down, and it’s been the greatest single thing that I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of, not just for the huge success of it, but for those people who are involved in it. I mean, I love those guys, man. I mean, it is like a family. It is so tight, so fun, we all love hanging out with each other outside the set, and we’re just laughing all day long on the set. I can’t imagine anything more fun. And because of it I’ve got to meet a lot of people I never would have, like tweens, coming up and wanting an autograph. I’m like, they never would have come up to me! They never would have seen anything I’d done. So it was really – that’s a cool thing as well. But it’s not like I think, I’m not one of those guys who say, “I do these… so that I can do the smaller movies.” I don’t do anything like that. I just take things as they come, and the fact that they keep coming is shocking, but I’m certainly happy to be a part of it.

You have a great character to play in The Hunger Games, but you didn’t look at that and go, this is probably going to be pretty successful?

Oh yeah, but that wasn’t my motivator, you know. I’m talking about times that I, you know, decided to do something because specifically because this is going to do well. A bad, bad decision – that’s something I would caution any actor against. It’s much better to say I liked this script and I really liked this character and I liked the director. I liked the other actors – whatever. But to say, oh, this will be successful, and that’s why I want to do it, that’s not good. But yeah, Hunger Games, everybody thought the odds were pretty good that people would go see it, and thank God they were right.

Christina Aguilera To Perform "We Remain" on Tue. Dec. 10 Live Episode of "The Voice"

Mark your calendars! Christina Aguilera will perform "We Remain," off the soundtrack of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, on the Tuesday, Dec. 10 live episode (9-10 p.m. ET/PT) of "The Voice."
She will sing "We Remain," which she wrote with OneRepublic founder Ryan Tedder - recently named the show's in-house producer.

Kimberley Drummond Shares 'Catching Fire' Set Photos

Kimberley Drummond, who was fantastic as Rue's aunt in Catching Fire (was I the only one who thought she was supposed to be Rue's mom?) shared some great behind the scenes pics from the set on her facebook page yesterday. Check them out and be sure to like her facebook page HERE.

Rue and Thresh's families and PeacekeepersKimberley with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson

Above: A Peacekeeper on set. Below: Bruce Bundy as Octavia

Kimberley With Leon Lamar. He was unforgettable in the movie!

It's Official: Our 'Catching Fire' Dudes are Hot

File Under: Well, duh! Glamour UK has named Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, and Sam Claflin among their 100 sexiest men of 2013. Congratulations on your sexiness!

Even More 'Catching Fire' Concept art

You know by now how much we admire the conceptual artists who help to create the amazing environments in the the movies we love. Thanks to our friends at QuarterQuell.org, we've got more of these beautiful images from Catching Fire, this time from artist Nathan Schroeder.

Schroeder is a concept artist in the motion picture industry, creating artwork for such films as X Men, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull, Star Trek XI, Fantastic Four: The Rise of The Silver Surfer, and more.

See more of the concept art from Catching Fire by Dawn Brown here and Joanna Bush here.

More after the jump!

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Here Come the 'Catching Fire' You Tube Videos

Feel like a laugh and aren't feeling too protective of Catching Fire at the moment? Then check out these YouTube videos with Catching Fire themes. The Fine Bros did an "Elders React to Catching Fire" - cringe inducing yet somehow hilarious, and Josh Sundquist did another one of his very amusing "For Math Nerds" videos on Catching Fire.