I am still upset about the passing of Donald Sutherland. Here is an article from GQ that I like in which he talks about why he begged Gary Ross to give him the role of President Snow.
Nobody asked me to do it [play Snow]. I wasn’t offered it [the role]. I like to read scripts, and it captured my passion. I wrote them a letter. The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn’t make any difference. I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it. I thought it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s. I hadn’t read the books. To be truthful, I was unaware of them. But they showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they formed the mind and wit of Coriolanus Snow.
in 2017, government documents revealed that Sutherland had been on a NSA watchlist due to his anti-war [Vietnam War] activities. Here's an article where his son, Keifer Sutherland, talks about how the FBI raided their house when he was a kid.
