Peter Dinklage – best known for playing Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones – has been cast as Casca Highbottom, Dean of the Academy, in the upcoming prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

Produced by Lionsgate, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins.

By 2014, when the four-film Hunger Games franchise ended, it had grossed over $3 billion (about Rs. 24,000 crore) worldwide. Now, Lionsgate is looking to extend the lifespan with the adaptation of Collins’ latest entry in the dystopian series.

Dinklage will star in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes alongside Tom Blyth, who plays young Coriolanus Snow, and Rachel Zegler, as a tribute to Lucy Gray Baird.

Josh Andrés Rivera, Hunter Schafer, and Jason Schwartzman are also part of the cast, as Snow’s close friend Sejanus Plinth, Snow’s cousin and confidant Tigris Snow, and 10th Hunger Games host Lucretius “Lucky Flickerman, respectively.

Francis Lawrence, who directed three of the four Hunger Games films, is back in charge with franchise producer Nina Jacobson and her partner Brad Simpson serving as producers. Michael Lesslie wrote the final draft of the screenplay.

The Lionsgate prequel logline reads: “Years before he becomes the tyrannical President of Panem, 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow is the last hope of his dwindling bloodline, a once-proud family that has fallen disgraced in a post-war Capitol. With the 10th annual Hunger Games fast approaching, young Snow is alarmed when he is appointed mentor to Lucy Gray Baird, the female tribute of impoverished District 12.”

“But after Lucy Gray gets Panem’s full attention by singing defiantly during the harvest ceremony, Snow thinks he might be able to turn the tide in their favor. Uniting their showmanship instincts and their new political sense, Snow and Lucy’s race against time to survive will ultimately reveal who is a songbird and who is a serpent,” he continues.

Dinklage recently starred in Cyrano for director Joe Wright. Her upcoming work includes Brothers opposite Josh Brolin and Brendan Fraser, and She Came to Me opposite Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei for writer-director Rebecca Miller.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Serpents is set to hit theaters worldwide on November 17, 2023.