Rachel Zegler sings raw version of ‘Hanging Tree’ in new ‘Hunger Games’ BTS

Rachel Zegler’s haunting vocals shone through as she sang the iconic folk ballad from The Hunger Games series.

The official Hunger Games Twitter account posted some new behind the scenes footage from the upcoming prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, starring Zegler in the leading role of Lucy Gray, that the honoured actress then re-posted to her Instagram stories on Saturday.

Sitting underneath a tree, Zegler gently strums her guitar and sings the melancholic and eerie tune as boom mic captures her haunting voice.

“Are you, are you comin’ to the tree?/ Where they strung up a man, they say, who murdered three/ Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be/ If we met at midnight in the hanging tree,” Zegler sings.

The footage then cuts to a camera screen recording a distant figure, possibly Tom Blyth’s Coriolanus Snow, walking beneath a colossal tree.

“The origins of The Hanging Tree lie with Lucy Gray,” the tweet read.

In Suzanne Collin’s 2020 prequel of the same name, District 12’s Lucy writes the song after she and Snow witnessed the public hanging of a rebel who killed three people.

The Ballads of Songbirds and Snakes will be released on November 17th, 2023.