For a person not yet 20 years old, Josh Hutcherson had a breathtaking career, even before he was cast as Peeta Mallark in the highly hyped The Hunger Games series. He had gone to the room of Jon Favreaus Zathura (2005), crossed the country with Robin Williams in RV (2006), Triped to the Center of the Earth with Brendan Fraser and starred in the four-time Oscar-nominated drama The children are well with Annette Bening and Julianne Moore.
The Hunger Games – which opened in theaters 10 years ago, on March 23, 2012 – drove Hutcherson to even greater new heights as the young actor attracted a rabid fan base during four films between 2012 and 2015. It also placed him in close company with a famous ensemble led by his colleague Kentucky native Jennifer Lawrence, who was in charge of the YA series, while at the same time starting to collect several Oscar nominations.
In a 2020 interview with Yahoo Entertainment (see above), Hutcherson remembers the first time he met Lawrence – pre-Panem, when both participated in the SAG Awards for their respective films The children are well and Winter’s Bone in early 2011.
“She came to me and she told me this story about how, when she was about 10 years old, she had seen in a local newspaper in Kentucky that this young actress had traveled to California … to become an actress. , and it was me., “says Hutcherson (see above). “And she showed it to her parents and said, ‘Look, I want to do this too. This kid [is] do it.’ So it’s crazy that we ended up making these movies together. ”
Hutcherson and Lawrence became very close during the filming of the series, although at times it was a painful relationship for the former. Only weeks inside the recordings of the 2012s The Hunger GamesLawrence accidentally kicked Hutcherson in the head while trying to show her legwork, knocking him out with a mild concussion.
“She was a real show-off and thought she was Jackie Chan or something,” laughed Hutcherson. “[She was] threw these air kicks and was like, ‘Josh, I can kick over your head!’ And then crack! She cut me in the temple. “I do not really remember because I was knocked out.”
When Hutcherson came to again, “she was crying. She was having a terrible time. I woke up with her [crying]lies over me. “
Hutcherson, who has since gone on to star in Hulu’s Man of the future and appeared in movies like Tragedy girls and The disaster artisthas called to work in The Hunger Games a “double-edged sword”.
“The biggest positive was, number one, the experience. The experience of getting to work with such incredible actors for so long and seeing how they work, from Jen to [Philip Seymour Hoffman] to [Woody Harrelson] for Donald Sutherland, the list is pretty overwhelming, Mahershala Ali, who went on to stratospheric levels later. “
The other end of the sword: Hutcherson’s concerns that he would be put into a certain type of role as playing the gentle and sweet “bread boy” Peeta Mallark for so long.
“You can be boxed in as an actor, professionally. And it’s hard, and people can only see you as that character, and it’s hard for them to imagine you in something else. And it’s hard, and it takes time and years to overcome it. ”
Hutcherson points to the career of Robert Pattinson, the Twilight heartbreaker that has received critical acclaim for indie films like Good time and The lighthouse and now makes several large tent poles as Tenet and Batman as “a great example of someone who was somehow attached to a huge, huge project and known as one character and now he kills it, does an incredible job as an actor and you don’t see him as that anymore . “
The impressive breadth of Hutcherson’s still young career says he will not be boxed in either.
– The story was originally published on September 15, 2020.