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Joined: Mar 2004
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Josh in Nylon magazine (great interview!)
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“THIS GUY IS SO DEAD,” Josh Hutcherson says, eyes fixed on a nearby man with a goatee and ski-capped Jheri curls. The guy sure is. Hutcherson’s six quick shots took off half his face, the entry wounds forming a tight circle in the upper right cranium where an aviator lens used to be. Pushing back the sleeve of his gray hoddie, Hutcherson sets down his Nighthawk 1911 semi-automatic and hits a button that sends the paper target flying toward him. “Ahh… I may have hit an innocent bystander behind him,” he says, examining a stray hole. “Damn.”
For whole interview and scans click the ‘Read More’
It’s just after noon on the Monday before Christmas and the square-jawed, compactly built 19-year-old actor is busy stoking the holiday spirit by shooting rounds at The Target Range in Los Angeles. The place is surprisingly crowded. A few twentysomethings share the booth next to us, passing a rented Glock between them to plug a teddy bear they brought as their own target. Hutcherson grimaces as a short guy with glasses takes aim at Teddy. “I think he’s shivering!” Hutcherson says, just before the stuffed animal’s right leg is blown to pieces. “That’s just wrong.”
None of our fellow shooters recognize Hutcherson, which makes sense considering he’s known mostly for family-friendly films like Journey to the Center of the Earth and Bridge to Terabithia. But they will soon. This March he stars in The Hunger Games, the cinematic first installment from Suzanne Collins’s best-selling book series and the most anticipated literary adaptation since Harry Potter and Twilight. With a budget of nearly $100 million, it’s the most expensive film Lionsgate has ever made, boasting a high-wattage ensemble cast including Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Lenny Kravitz, and Jennifer Lawrence. This is the kind of event movie that will abruptly change Hutcherson’s life, making innocent Monday visits to a shooting gallery fodder for Perez Hilton and US Weekly.
While this is Hutcherson’s first visit to The Target Range, he’s no stranger to guns: He grew up in eastern Kentucky and when he was all of 10 spent a memorable afternoon blowing apart the walls of an abandoned house with a shotgun (under the supervision of his neighbor’s grandpa). Two years ago he shot AK-47s, Uzis, and – on top of a tank – a .50-caliber rifle while he was filming the remake of Red Dawn (which is finally coming out this fall). Today he’s keeping it simple: a .38 Special, a Glock 9mm, and his favorite, the Nighthawk. The targets show unnervingly good aim: heads and hearts riddled with holes, shoulders and stomachs untouched. He’s also a patient, praiseful teacher, showing a trembling beginner how to hold a gun, aim it calmly, and hit the target on the first try. “It’s cool,” he says amusedly, as my shaky hands reload the Nighthawk’s chamber. “Don’t be afraid.”
This would seem to be the Josh Hutcherson mantra, the same one emblazoned in jagged, black-outlined font on redneck bumper stickers throughout his corner of Kentucky: No Fear. It’s the motto of someone who doesn’t know failure, doesn’t know no. And why should he? He’s taleneted, starring in more than a dozen films since the age of nine, when he convinced his parents that he was destined for a Hollywood career despite a lack of training or experience; smart and quick witter in a way that makes him seem ageless; good-looking, but not in a punitive, genetic lottery-winning way; and disarmingly friendly without a dose of narcissism. During our interview, when I ask him what his biggest fear is, Hutcherson thinks for a while. “I’m not really afraid of anything,” he says at first. Then he bits and almost gnaws on his bottom lip as he gives the question more thought. “Umm… well, I hate spiders!” he manages. “Yeah. They’re the only thing I’m really afraid of. Like Indy and snakes.”
After Hutcherson takes care of the bill at the gun range (“You should never pay for your first time shooting,” he tells me) and briefly considers buying a year-long membership, we head for lunch at a fine establishment called Dr. Hogly Wogly’s Tyler Texas Barbeque that’s just a few blocks away. Hutcherson chooses a booth in the back, next to a fake, tinselladen Christmas tree and a framed American flag, and orders a plate of spare ribs, potato salad, baked beans, and a Coke. “This may be the best day of my life,” he says when the waitress delivers his massive platter. “I get to shoot a bunch of guns, and now I get to have barbeque at Dr. Hogly Wogly’s.”
Though Hutcherson has lived in L.A. for more than half of his life, he still considers himself a Kentuckian. “I have a couch on my front porch here in Los Angeles, I have Christmas lights up year-round, and I have a Jack Daniels pool table,” he says, mouth full of pork. “So I’m tried-and-true Kentucky blue.” His parents were high school sweethearts, and his grandparents and aunts and uncles are a short drive away from his hometown of Union (population: 5,379). None of them are in the entertainment business – his dad works for the Environmental Protection Agency and his mom used to work for Delta – so it came as a bit of a shock when Hutcherson announced that he wanted to be an actor at the age of nine. He had never even done a school play (“I thought they were cheesy and unrealistic; I would get mad about the artistic integrity!”) and his only real experience entertaining a crowd was singing “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” by Brooks and Dunn at the Boone County Fair as a five-year0old.
Nevertheless, his parents took him seriously. “They were always the ones saying, ‘You can be whatever you want when you grow up, the world is yours, and as your parents our job is to make that possible: to make your dreams come true,” he recalls. “So when I told them I wanted to be an actor, they were like, ‘Ummmm, OK. We don’t really know how to go about this, but let’s try it.’”
They found an agent in the Yellow Pages and Hutcherson started going on auditions for local TV commercials. Around the same time, an acting coach came down to nearby Cincinnati, Ohio, to do a seminar and Hutcherson was admitted, despite the fact it was an adult class. Impressed, the coach suggested that he and his mom go to L.A. for pilot season. And so, in the summer of 2002, they did. He quickly scored a Hollywood agent, and soon after had his first starring role in an Animal Planet movie called Miracle Dogs. “It’s about a magical dog that could lick people and heal them. Fantastic. Based on a true tory.” He laughs. “Not at all.”
The parts came fast after that. He performed the motion-capture work for the lead character in the animated 3-D film The Polar Express; starred in Jon Favreau’s fantasy film Zathura; played Robin Williams’s kid in the comedy RV; scored praise from The New York Times for his turn in Bridge to Terabithia; and fought off dinosaurs alongside Brendan Fraser in Journey to the Center of the Earth (the sequel of which comes out in February, this time costarring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). He credits much of his early success to his ease with adults. “I could just walk into an [audition] and – BOOM! – have full-on conversations. So that was my thing: being able to communicate with older people.” He never took any acting clases; on sets, he’d just carefully observe his more experienced costars, “watching what they do, their process, how they slip in and out of character and the choices they make.” By the age of 13, he started to really understand his own process. “I figured out how to put myself in the character,” he says. “[Up until then], if I had to cry, I’d just think about sad things. But that can get you very depressed after a while, because you’re always thinking about people you love dying.”
He sees his role in the 2010 Oscar-nominated indie The Kids Are All Right – as Laser, the son of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening’s characters, who’s eager to find his sperm-donor dad – as the first step in his transition from child actor to actor. “That’s one of the hardest things, and a lot of child actors don’t make that jump,” he says. “But since I got into acting, my goal was to act for the rest of my life. So I knew that transition was going to happen at some point.”
With The Hunger Games, the transition will be complete. Though the books are considered young adult fiction, they’re best sellers among every age group, much like Harry Potter (there are currently more than 16 million copies of the trilogy in circulation), and countless fan sites have been breathlessly tracking every bit of news about the film since it was announced last year. Lionsgate even released the movie poster in puzzle parts, a new section each week, as if somehow revealing the whole image at once might blow people’s minds.
The story is dark, part Lord of the Flies, part 1984. It’s set in the distant future after a war has destroyed North America, and a prevailing totalitarian government has divided the new nation into 12 fenced-in districts, where poor citizens work to feed the needs of the wealthy people living in the Capitol. Every year, to punish the citizens for a previous rebellion – and to frighten them from ever rebelling again – two teens from each district are selected by lottery to compete in The Hunger Games, a televised battle to the death, where only one will survive. The plot unfolds through the eyes of 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence in the film), who volunteers to compete in place of her younger sister, who is selected. The boy chosen is Peeta Mellark (Hutcherson), who, it turns out, has long been in love with Katniss and makes it his goal to keep her alive in the Games.
Hutcherson read the books after he found out they were being turned into movies. “I tore through them in like five days – I loved it. And I loved Peeta,” he says, wiping his face with a napkin and scooting his plate to the side. “It was scary to me how much I connected with Peeta. He has this belief that no matter what circumstances you’re put into, you maintain being true to yourself, and that’s one of my golden morals. In this business especially, you have a lot of opportunities to be fake. When Peeta goes into the Games, he’s not going to let it change who he is. And I’m going into the games of the acting world, and I’m not going to let it change who I am. Peeta also has a self-deprecating humor, and he can communicate really well, and I feel that I have that. I hadn’t ever read any material like that where I felt so much like a character. So I was like, I have to do this movie. I have to.”
Fortunately, director Gary Ross felt the same way. “He walked in and he said, ‘Listen, I Understand this guy, and in many ways, I am this guy,’” recalls Ross. “Then he articulated exactly what our view of the character was. Suzanne Collins was actually in town with me that day, and we sort of looked at each other and went, Well, yeah, that’s exactly how we see the character, and she created him. And then he proceeded to show us exactly that in his audition, so we were pretty clear from the outset.” They called Hutcherson back for a chemistry test with Lawrence and that sealed it. “Sometimes as a director, when you’re in an audition, you see the movie reveal itself in front of you for the first time, and that’s what I felt when I saw them together,” Ross says.
Lawrence is a fellow Kentucky native, and the two had met once before, at the SAG Awards earlier that year. He was there for The Kids Are All Right, she for Winter’s Bone. “She came up to me and said, ‘When I was in New York City, and I was starting to act, I wasn’t booking a lot of stuff, and my mom and I were talking about going back to Kentucky and maybe trying again when I was older. But I was really determined to not give up on acting, and I saw you in a newspaper as a boy from Kentucky who was making it in Hollywood. And I took it to my mom, and I was like, Look, he can do this. I can do this, too.’” He pauses, smiling at the memory. “So she’s nominated for an Academy Award and she’s telling me that I inspired her to keep going. It really took me back.”
After he got the part, Hutcherson had five weeks to put on 15 pounds of muscle. “Which I did in four,” he says, smirking. “Just saying.” He worked out five days a week with a Navy Seal trainer (“the coolest guy in the world, but he will break your neck by looking at you”), pulling weighted car tires across a gymnasium with a rope and hitting a punching bag with a baseball bat until his arms were practically numb. He needed that muscle for the shoot in North Carolina, spending his day running through the forest, escaping arrows, firebombs, and CGI monsters.
Now Hutcherson needs a different kind of stamina to keep up with the three months of Hunger Games promotion laid out for him – the premieres in London, Berlin, New York and L.A. and press junkets across the world. And then, in the fall, he’ll be back on set to film the second movie, Catching Fire, which already has a release date planned for November 2013. Though some might find it daunting to have the next few years of their life mapped out, Hutcherson is grateful. “Here’s why I love it,” he says, chewing on his soda straw. “As an actor, no matter how good you’re told you are, how successul you are – even Julianne Moore said this to me – you’re like, Will I ever get hired again? Do I actually suck at acting? How long until they realize I really can’t do this? I literally think about this all the time. So to have four movies that I know I’m going to be doing? It’s like, OK, I can breathe.”
Currently Hutcherson is trying to line up another film to support this spring. For fun, he plays in a basketball league, and his team happened to win a recent championship; he pulls out his cracked iPhone to show me a photo and laughs as he points out the fact his teammates are “all white guys, and three of them went to Harvard” while another team boasted “two six-foot-10 ex-NBA players.” His Hunger Games costar Woody Harrelson played ball with him on set in North Carolina and confirms that he’s a strong player. “He plays basketball like he lives his life – he just gives it the whole hog,” Hutcherson says. “We were on different teams, and it was quite a contest. As a defender, he doesn’t give you any room to breathe! I’d much prefer him to be on my side. I don’t want him as an adversary.”
Hutcherson also works with the charity Straight But Not Narrow, founded by one of his best friends, Avan Jogia (who stars on the Nickelodeon show Victorious). Their goal is to combat homophobia among young, heterosexual males through a series of PSAs in which straight actors like Hutcherson and Glee’s Cory Monteith voice their support of the gay community. “To have a ‘manly man guy’ come out and say, ‘Yeah guys, being gay is totally cool,’ I think this is getting the message out there that it makes you more of a man to be comfortable with who you are and what you believe in.”
To say the least, Hutcherson is comfortable with who he is. Without a hint of embarrassment, he admits that he really misses his mom, who moved back to Kentucky when he turned 18. For years, it was the two of them; until he was 16, she legally had to accompany him on set. She was even there with him when he got his first tattoo – a Libra sign with a star for each member of his family on his left wrist – while filming Red Dawn. (He lifts up his T-shirt to show me his newest addition: a classic Sailor Jerry anchor on his left side.) When she first moved back to Union to be with Hutcherson’s dad and younger brother, Connor, his response was, “Yes! I’m free!” But now, he says, “There are times where I’ll be at the movies with friend or out bowling, and I’ll say, ‘I wish my mom was here…’”
Hutcherson’s parents plan to move to L.A. once Connor graduates from high school – which, it turns out, will be good for business. Hutcherson started a production company a few years ago with his mom, and he hopes to direct his first feature film soon. “I’ve always wanted to get behind the camera,” he says. “But it takes a lot of time. I don’t want to just go direct a movie and then hand it off to the editor. I want to do preproduction for three months, then production, then post for five months, and edit it myself. So finding that time is important to me. I don’t want to half-ass it.” He already has his project lined up: an adaptation of the young adult novel Echo by Kate Morgenroth, which he plans to direct, produce, write, and star in.
“I think he’d be a great director,” says Gary Ross without hesitation. “He was incredibly curious with what was going on around him on set and he was very engaged with the movie-making process. Josh is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He’s also such an amazing actor. I just think he’s sort of peerless in his generation.”
Actor, director, writer, producer – at 19? There’s no clear reason why Hutcherson couldn’t achieve this, and it’s clear he’s not afraid to try. But as we wrap up the interview and muse on how everything is going to change once The Hunger Games arrives, he realizes there is something he is genuinely afraid of. “I’m scared of The Hunger Games changing how people treat me,” he says. “Just like the amount of times that people on set offer you a bottle of water or ask if you need anything – I already don’t like that. I’m like, ‘Ask somebody who’s working hard. I can go get a bottle of water.’ But – knock on wood – if it is that successful, that sort of mentality is going to build, and I hate it.”
Though the past 10 years of his life have been anything but normal, that’s how he wants people to see him. He doesn’t want an assistant or paparazzi tails, and he doesn’t want to share his feelings with millions of Twitter followers. “I’m more of an analog kind of guy,” he says, flashing a broad grin. “Guns. Barbeque. That’s the world I live in.”
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Article that accompanied the MTV interview videos:
Quote:
Feb 2 2012 6:53 AM EST 772
'Hunger Games' Stars Jennifer And Josh: How They Met
Well, sort of. 'Are you sure that's when we met?' Hutcherson asks as Lawrence recalls her version of events to MTV News.
By Kara Warner (@karawarner) , with reporting by Josh Horowitz (@joshuahorowitz)
Here at MTV News, we are counting down the days until "The Hunger Games" arrives in theaters. If you've been spending any time with us recently, you know we've been keeping a close eye and ear on all the details about the big-screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins' dystopian best-seller.
Last week, we capped off a month of juicy interviews with stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth, for which all the questions were supplied by you, the fans. We're going to keep our coverage rolling with another new chat with Lawrence and Hutcherson, in which they address the hot topics of their first meeting and that infamous "chemistry read."
When MTV News asked the two obvious real-life friends to recall their first meeting, we inadvertently started a playful debate.
"When was the first time we met? I remember it like it was yesterday," Hutcherson joked.
"When was that? You were at a dance-floor something, and I came up to you like, 'What's up?' " Lawrence recalled, making motions with her arms like she approached Hutcherson mid-dance. "I freaked you out, because I started telling you that thing ... "
"Are you sure that's when we met?" Hutcherson chimed in.
"Yeah, at the SAG Awards," Lawrence said. "You were on a dance floor."
"Yeah, the SAG Awards, but we weren't dancing at the SAG Awards," Hutcherson corrected.
The two clearly had differing opinions on the meeting. They went back-and-forth on a few blurry details and couldn't even remember what color dress Lawrence was wearing at the time.
"I met you in a hot-pink dress," Hutcherson said.
"No, I met you in a white dress!" Lawrence countered.
"Same thing!" Hutcherson said with a laugh.
Since that discussion was getting us nowhere, we asked the two about their "chemistry read," the point during the audition process when the two actors read their respective roles together for an audience of filmmakers and studio representatives.
"They had hired Jennifer, and they were trying to find Peeta. I had gone in for the first round of auditions, and a few weeks later, they brought me back," Hutcherson said. "We did a chemistry read and kind of hit it off right away, I felt, for the second time, third time," he joked, playing up the foggy memories of their first meeting. "So that's the first time we got to play the characters together."
"We had tons of chemistry," Lawrence insisted with a laugh. "He was Peeta," she added of her first impressions of Hutcherson as "the boy with the bread." "I had heard the director, I had heard Gary [Ross] say, 'He is the only one who is actually Peeta,' and then [Josh] came in, and he was. He's charming and nice and sweet, like a dog licking your face."
"A dog licking on your face?" Hutcherson asked, wondering if Lawrence was paying him a compliment or not.
"It is! That's what it's like hanging out with you, it's like, 'Eeeeee!' " Lawrence said of her excitement being around the 19-year-old.
So what does Hutcherson think of hanging out with Lawrence? "Like a dog licking your face, but 'Oh, God, get this away,' " he joked. "No, it's hard to get things done when we're together. I'm amazed this interview we've gotten as many questions in as we have. We just start going and end up talking about the most random things."
"We always play off each other," Lawrence added.
"It works," Hutcherson said.
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'Hunger Games' Stars Jennifer And Josh: How They Met - MTV Movie News| MTV |