If you know me, you know I am absolutely obsessed with the latest Hunger Games book, Sunrise on the Reaping. From its release in March 2025, through the casting announcements and the press tour, I have been counting down the days until the adaptation hits theaters. And even more so since the trailers have come out.
And while Sunrise on the Reaping already seems to have a lot of great scenes that will be a part of the film (just judging from the trailers we’ve witnessed), there’s one particular moment that I need to see, one that will change how a lot of casual watchers of The Hunger Games movies perceive this character.
And that has to do with Wiress, played by Maya Hawke in Sunrise on the Reaping.
Wiress was known to be intelligent but was fragmented in Catching Fire
The first time we meet Wiress in The Hunger Games books, it’s because she is reaped for the 75th Quarter Quell, since she was one of the few victors from her District. This is when Katniss meets her, and we discover… well, a fragmented part of who she used to be.
Throughout the novel, we see that Wiress is incredibly smart, but due to the past torture and pain she had gone through thanks to the Capitol, she doesn’t really ever speak that much. She’d start speaking and then trail off, as Katniss describes, as if she forgot the person she was talking to was even there. Then, in the games, it only gets worse. It seems that her trauma is at least a little healed, but being within the confines of the entire games just makes it that much more difficult for her.
But we also see that she can pick up on things, is clever in so many ways, and, honestly, she’s a big reason Katniss and her whole 75th Quarter Quell group can survive. She’s the one who realizes the arena is like a clock and that they need to know where to go at the right time to survive. Without her, they wouldn’t have made it out alive.
That being said, that’s really one of the only times we really see her true intelligence before she is sadly killed in the Games by Gloss. Katniss does avenge her death; however, we don’t really see her mentioned much more, which is a shame.
We never see how she won the Games in the original books. But we get that in Sunrise on the Reaping, and it’s incredible.
The way Wiress won her Games shows how incredibly smart she is
If you haven’t read Sunrise on the Reaping, I’d suggest you skip this part to avoid spoilers. But if you have, I’m talking about the moment I need to see Maya Hawke act out when Wiress won her Games. It wasn’t through killing. In fact, Wiress didn’t kill a single person during her time.
She won through a blind spot.
During her time in the 49th Hunger Games, she was able to memorize terrain that had a lot of reflective surfaces and found a blind spot, one where neither the Gamemakers nor the tributes could see her. She made it all the way to the end of the Games and was declared the winner when the last two tributes ended up dying — one killed and the other cracking his head on a reflective surface.
I mean, come on. That’s the kind of intelligence and sheer resilience you’d only find in someone like her, and it’s a shame we don’t see that as much as we should. She has a decent role in Sunrise on the Reaping as Haymitch’s mentor, since there were no living District 12 winners, so she and Mags took on the roles. But there needs to be an explanation.
I know it would make casual viewers love her character as much as she should, and it would be even more valuable to the story as a whole.
It’s interesting because this version of Wiress, which we’ll see in the new film, sees her before she goes through the Capitol's pain and trauma. Hawke herself even talked about it in an interview with Vogue HK about how it’s like threading "a delicate needle,” trying to portray her before everything that happens:
“The most difficult thing about playing Wiress is that the only Wiress we see in the movies is a Wiress in the aftermath of a massive plot point from Sunrise on the Reaping. This experience during this book informs when you meet Wiress in the later films and books, and she, you know, is pretty nonverbal and really struggles to communicate—that’s the trauma response to her having been tortured at the end of Sunrise on the Reaping.”
Seeing her win the Games will only add to how she helps Haymitch in his — and in his rebellious nature. It’s a win-win, and it has to be done, even if I’ll still see the movie regardless.
The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping arrives in theaters on Nov. 20, 2026.
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