Hunger Games Fans Already Met Tigris Before The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes
Featured in bits throughout the official trailer for "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes" is Hunter Schafer, who plays a young Capitol citizen who's also an apparent friend/confidant of young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth), the guy who will one day become the tyrannical President of Panem. It's a delight for "Euphoria" fans to see Schafer here, even if her role as a Capitol citizen doesn't imply great things about her character.
But Schafer's character in the trailer doesn't seem like what we'd expect from a Capitol citizen, and that's part of why she was cast in the first place. "So many people came in and read, [but] they were thinking more of Liz Banks' Effie Trinket than they were of Tigris," director Francis Lawrence told Entertainment Weekly recently. "They're putting on this Capitol [affect], and it's just so phony. Hunter came in and did the scene, and she was so endearing and warm."
But for fans of the original trilogy, this reasoning might sound surprising. Why would an "endearing and warm" performance be ideal for a character who, in her brief appearances in "Mockingjay," was anything but? And if you're a more casual fan of the series, someone who hasn't read or watched it in years, you might just be wondering: Who even is Tigris? So far the character has only popped up briefly, after all, so forgetting about her by now is a forgivable offense.
Taking plastic surgery a bit too far
Tigris's first-ever appearance is in chapter 23 of "Mockingjay," where Katniss's small team of rebels needs a place to hide within the Capitol. Katniss herself is at a loss for where to go, but Cressida (played in the films by Natalie Dormer) takes them to Tigris's fabric shop. Almost immediately, she makes Katniss feel ill at ease, because by this point the elderly Tigris is more cat than woman.
"She's an extreme example of surgical enhancement gone wrong," the narration reads from Katniss's perspective, "for surely not even in the Capitol could they find this face attractive. The skin has been pulled back tightly and tattooed with black and gold stripes. The nose has been flattened until it barely exists [...] The result is a grotesque, semi-feline mask, which now squints at us distrustfully."
In addition to looking like a tiger, Tigris also has a purring voice, has a tendency to growl, and apparently only eats raw meat. (Katniss is skeptical on that last point, suspecting Tigris is just lying to maintain her animal persona.) At first glance, Tigris seems like a clear example of the excesses of the Capitol gone too far. The books have often portrayed the Capitol citizens' love of fashion, make-up, and plastic surgery in deeply cynical terms, as a sign of straightforward decadence and a sign of their unnatural isolation from any real struggle or concern.
But within the mere dozen or so pages Tigris is on the page, we get a lot more hints about her past, implying that her transformation might not be as vanity-driven as it might seem ...
Tigris's fall from grace
Before Tigris was a solitary shopkeeper in the Capitol, she was one of the most famous people in the country. "She was a fixture — a younger, less disturbing version of herself — in the earliest Hunger Games I remember," Katniss recalls. She was a stylist for another district, who "must have had one operation too many and crossed the line into repellence." Since then she's been essentially exiled out of the public eye, her days of being a beloved stylist officially over.
For the most part, Tigris seems like a commentary on Hollywood's questionable handling of female body image issues over the years. We all know a story of one celebrity or another who was renowned for beauty in their youth, felt pressured into getting plastic surgery, only to be gawked at by the tabloids (and now the internet comments) when people picked up on the signs of that plastic surgery. We demand celebrities hide their inevitable signs of aging, but also mock them for giving into those demands.
Luckily people don't usually turn themselves into tigers in real life, but the metaphor seems clear. It also sounds like Tigris became such a big hit partly because of the tiger gimmick; she was initially rewarded for the plastic surgeries, only for the gimmick to grow stale while Tigris was stuck living with the results. Or perhaps Tigris felt her popularity waning and went through all the excess surgeries in a futile attempt to get it back. Or perhaps, as is arguably implied by the text of "Mockingjay," President Snow (Donald Sutherland) pressured her into it.
Her dislike of Snow
Despite seeming like "the embodiment of Capitol shallowness," Tigris proves to be a vital ally to Katniss in her time of need. She doesn't just give them hidden shelter, but she volunteers to go out into the Capitol to pick up on any helpful information. We never get her motivations, but Katniss thinks it's revenge. When she tells Tigris she's going to kill President Snow, she tells us, "[Tigris's] mouth spreads into what I take for a smile."
Then again, Tigris could also just be meant to show how Snow has been losing influence among a lot of his usual trusted allies in the Capitol by this point in the trilogy. By the final act of "Mockingjay," it seems abundantly clear to everyone in-universe that the districts are winning the war, and a lot of Capitol civilians are looking for their chance to jump ship.
Either way, it's clear that whatever happens in the 60+ years between the upcoming prequel and the original trilogy, Tigris and Snow do not stay close. Whatever warmth's between them in their youth is not going to last; the juicy part's going to be figuring out exactly how and why. The tale is likely bitter and tragic, but at least Tigris fans have the satisfaction of knowing she'll get the last laugh. While Snow is getting clawed to death by an angry mob at the end of "Mockingjay: Part 2," Tigris is presumably chilling, living her best cat life in post-revolution Panem. With Katniss's team likely spreading word of Tigris's helpfulness, she'll probably be treated well even by the more vindictive members of the rebel movement.
How the movies treat her
"Mockingjay: Part 2" was a faithful adaptation — perhaps a little too faithful — but it also took a little bit of the mystery out of the character. Whereas the book left Tigris' motivations unclear, the movie spells it out early on. "I know you. You were a stylist in the games," Katniss says, to which Tigris responds, "Until Snow decided I wasn't pretty enough anymore."
It's a line that helps get the character across quickly to the audience, but it's also one that seems to cheapen the character a bit. Does Tigris help Katniss out of the goodness of her heart, because she sympathizes with the rebels, because she's realized how inhumane it is to force children to fight to their deaths? No, this line seems to tell us, she hates Snow because he said she wasn't pretty.
Luckily, the trailers and early clips for this upcoming prequel promise a more complicated, sympathetic version of her character. Hunter Schafer seems to be playing Tigris as the angel on Snow's shoulder, pushing him to treat District 12's Lucy (Rachel Zegler) with more compassion. As shallow as Tigris might seem in the original movie trilogy, it doesn't seem like that's the version of her we'll be getting here.