Why Cooper Hoffman isn't playing Plutarch in Sunrise on the Reaping
Francis Lawrence has explained why Cooper Hoffman was never cast as the young Plutarch Heavensbee in Sunrise on the Reaping, telling The Hollywood Reporter that the role Hoffman’s late father originated needed an actor who “felt considerably older” than Hoffman, who is 23.
The comment sits inside THR’s 5 August cover story on Hoffman, written by Seija Rankin — a piece otherwise built around Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, which reaches Australian cinemas on 27 August, and Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial. One thing worth stating plainly, because the aggregation around this has been careless: Cooper Hoffman says nothing about the casting. Every Plutarch line in the story is Lawrence’s.
The 5 August cover. Story by Seija Rankin — read it at The Hollywood Reporter.
“I love to work with people over and over, and Cooper is high on that list, but we needed someone who felt considerably older than Cooper is.”
Francis Lawrence
The two of them had already met
Lawrence directed Hoffman in The Long Walk, shot in chronological order across seven weeks in Winnipeg and released in Australian cinemas last September, with the cast covering close to four hundred miles on foot by Hoffman’s own estimate. He was also the last filmmaker to direct Philip Seymour Hoffman, on Mockingjay. His account of meeting the son is the most affecting thing in the piece.
“I will say that meeting Cooper the first time [for my film] was very powerful. To see, and feel, the similarities they both have, it made me emotional.”
Francis Lawrence
The man who got the part played Hoffman’s son
The role went to Jesse Plemons, 38 — casting with its own quiet symmetry. Plemons played Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and Anderson is the same director who put Cooper Hoffman on screen for the first time, in Licorice Pizza. Three actors, one filmmaker, and a role that keeps circling back to the same family.
Plemons has said that history nearly cost the production its Plutarch. “I don’t know if this makes sense, but it was actually one of the things that made me question if I wanted to do it,” he told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in October last year, citing his “respect and admiration” for Hoffman. “I think I just decided, you know what? I want to do it. I like the part, and I like the script, and I like the director and the cast.”
The arithmetic doesn’t behave
Lawrence’s phrasing rewards a second read, because the numbers underneath it don’t line up the way fans have assumed.
- The 50th Hunger Games — Sunrise on the Reaping. Jesse Plemons, 38, plays Plutarch.
- The 75th Hunger Games — Catching Fire, twenty-five years later. Philip Seymour Hoffman played him at 45.
- Suzanne Collins has never given Plutarch an age. Not in the original trilogy, not in Sunrise. There is no number to work from.
Read backwards from Hoffman, the young Plutarch would be somewhere around twenty. Read forwards from Plemons, he is in his early sixties by the time Katniss meets him — the better part of two decades older than Hoffman played him. The production is plainly not doing strict subtraction, and that, rather than the casting itself, is the interesting part.
It also fits what Plutarch actually is in this book. He isn’t a Gamemaker yet. He runs the Capitol camera unit covering District 12’s reaping, and he is a rebel in secret — a man with a position to protect and something to lose, not a boy on work experience. “Considerably older” is doing real work in that sentence.
There was never a routine way to recast this
Philip Seymour Hoffman died on 2 February 2014 with scenes still to shoot on Mockingjay – Part 2. Rather than reconstruct him digitally, Lawrence rewrote the ending: Plutarch’s final address to Katniss became a letter, read aloud by Haymitch. “To try to fake a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance would have been catastrophic,” the director said at the time. Twelve years on, his answer to THR reads like a man who has thought about it for most of them.
In Australia
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens in Australian cinemas on 19 November 2026 through Roadshow Films — a day ahead of North America — with Joseph Zada as Haymitch Abernathy and Plemons as Plutarch. Full cast, dates and stills are on the film hub. Cooper Hoffman can be seen in I Want Your Sex from 27 August.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Cooper Hoffman cover story by Seija Rankin, 5 August 2026 · Happy Sad Confused, Jesse Plemons interview, October 2025 · Francis Lawrence on the Mockingjay – Part 2 rewrite, HuffPost Live, 2015. Cover image The Hollywood Reporter; courtside photograph James Devaney / FilmMagic.
