But you wouldn’t know it based on what she’s done so far: a few hours of making flash cards for an upcoming project followed by a full slate of meetings, one per hour. Now we’re at dinner in New York City, talking about her role as the brilliant, unconventional victor Wiress in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. Stepping into a beloved pop culture franchise is nothing new for the 28-year-old multi-hyphenate (she played both the smart, sarcastic Robin Buckley in Stranger Things and the voice of the perpetually frazzled Anxiety in Inside Out 2).
Neither is existing in a curious state of constant motion. In the past year alone, Maya has released a folk-pop album, Maitreya Corso; filmed and appeared in multiple TV and film projects; served as a Prada brand ambassador; and gotten married to singer-songwriter Christian Lee Hutson. Yet beneath the impressive velocity, Maya is interested in all the quiet she can get.
She’s soaking it in because she knows that come this winter, she’ll be under an arena-size spotlight thanks to Sunrise on the Reaping—and that for her, everything might be about to change. On Stranger Things, I was joining a cast that had done the first two seasons. That held a different kind of weight.
With this film, everyone had this newness to them. We are all in it together and will sink or swim as a team. There’s something relaxing about that.
People are going to lose their minds. I was like, Whoa, that’s how you step on set! I had a different amount to work with.
Amanda has three minutes total screen time as Wiress, and what we’ve seen of her character is someone who has been transformed by the events that unfold in Sunrise. We don’t know what she was like before that trauma happened. I read the book a bunch of times.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
