Josh Hutcherson was making an attempt get the hell out of Los Angeles. For the higher a part of a decade, the “Starvation Video games” star and his girlfriend, Spanish actor Claudia Traisac, had break up their time between L.A. and Madrid, however the eight-hour time distinction between the cities had grown wearying. So Hutcherson leased an house in Brooklyn, and in April of this 12 months, the couple flew into New York Metropolis from Spain, desirous to launch their new East Coast life — till, within the automobile from JFK, Hutcherson obtained a name from his agent.
“‘How do you are feeling about going again to the airport proper now?’” Hutcherson recollects his agent asking. “I used to be like, ‘I don’t fucking really feel good about it, by no means! Why?’”
The agent defined that Rachel Sennott, the buzzy star of indie hits “Bottoms” and “Shiva Child,” was launching her first comedy collection with HBO, and he or she wished Hutcherson to play her character’s boyfriend. However it was going to begin capturing in roughly two weeks, and the present’s eventual title doubled as its location: “I Love L.A.”
It was the telephone name that Hutcherson had spent years ready to get. He’d been performing since he was 9; he’d landed his first starring function at 13, in “Zathura: A Area Journey”; he had a key supporting function in 2010 finest image nominee “The Children Are All Proper” at 16; and when he was 18, he was catapulted into world superstardom when he was forged as Peeta Mellark in “The Starvation Video games.” However as Hutcherson drifted towards 30, the roles began to dry up.
“I went by way of just a few years the place it was sort of slim pickings, and I wasn’t doing a lot,” he says quietly, swirling his espresso cup outdoors a bistro in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood. “A whole lot of younger actors don’t make the transition, or the business kicks them out. I used to be sort of like, is that this the time the place I’m over it and completed?”
As a substitute, at 33, Hutcherson is getting into a brand new profession peak. On Dec. 5, he’ll star in Blumhouse’s “5 Nights at Freddy’s 2,” tailored from the feverishly widespread online game franchise — the primary “Freddy’s” film was an surprising hit in 2023, grossing $292 million worldwide. And after scrambling to get out of his NYC lease, he did certainly be part of the forged of “I Love L.A.,” an expertise that “reignited such a love and appreciation for this job in me,” he says. “I’ve all the time wished to do an HBO comedy on Sunday night time. That, to me, is a dream come true.”
Rachel Sennott and Josh Hutcherson in “I Love L.A.”
Kenny Laubbacher/HBO
On “I Love L.A.” — which premiered on Nov. 2, runs by way of Dec. 21 and was simply renewed for a second season — Hutcherson performs Dylan, a schoolteacher who loves his live-in girlfriend Maia (Sennott), regardless of the chaos that her ambition to turn into a expertise supervisor brings into his life.
“I grew up watching him in ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ and ‘The Starvation Video games,’ and there’s one thing about him, how heat and beautiful he’s,” Sennott instructed Selection in October. “I used to be so impressed by his comedic and improv chops. But in addition, for audiences, I feel you see him and you’re feeling like he’s your boyfriend just a little.”
Hutcherson smiles once I inform him Sennott’s reasoning for casting him. “I’m generally known as the good-hearted golden boy, which I’m not mad about,” he says. He has tried to interrupt freed from that notion, most not too long ago by taking part in the poisonous tech bro villain within the 2024 Jason Statham motion movie “The Beekeeper.” However with “I Love L.A.,” Hutcherson says he was “completely satisfied to lean into” his Good Man persona. “If it obtained me on set and capturing this with Rachel — it’s meant to be.”
A part of the enchantment had been the times through the eight-week shoot when Hutcherson actually walked to work. “The primary script talked about Erewhon and Tenants of the Timber and the reservoir,” he says, ticking off landmarks of L.A.’s Eastside. “That’s my circuit. That’s the place I’ve been haunting for years.”
He additionally felt at house as the one character on the present who isn’t obsessive about breaking into present enterprise. “Although I’ve been doing this since I used to be 9, and I’m so wildly on this business, I don’t really feel like I’m in so some ways,” he says. “I don’t go to occasions until I must be there. I’m not lively on social media until the studio is like, we’d like you to be. I’ve all the time been one foot in, one foot out. Once I began, I didn’t have a starvation for changing into well-known; I simply wished to make motion pictures and TV exhibits. I really feel like that aligns with Dylan. He simply needs to exist and do one thing he cares about.”
The possibility to play an on a regular basis grownup dwelling on the earth because it exists in 2025 is uncommon for any actor proper now, and Hutcherson doesn’t take it with no consideration. “I’ve grown up working with tennis balls and inexperienced screens,” he says. “I don’t should attempt to persuade the viewers that we’re, like, X quantity of years sooner or later in a dystopic society or that these animatronics are possessed by ghost kids.”
Common/Courtesy Everett Assortment
He’s referring, after all, to the “Freddy’s” motion pictures, which revolve round a creepy, long-shuttered pizzeria joint à la Chuck E. Cheese and its homicidal robotic animal mascots which can be embodied by the spirits of murdered children. The flowery animatronic costumes created by Jim Henson’s Creature Store could be worn by the performers just for half-hour at a time earlier than the burden and warmth turn into overwhelming. And after they do have the costumes on, there’s no assure they’re going to work proper.
“The stunt actor has to show and look to the best, however then three folks with distant controls should make the eyes time with the blink,” Hutcherson says. “You’ll do 10 takes, as a result of the animatronic motion isn’t fairly working. That one take that the animatronic is ideal, you higher be good too, as a result of that’s the one which’s going within the film.”
The sequel, Hutcherson estimates, has “greater than double” the creatures from the primary movie, one in all which, the character known as Mangle, requires “a workforce of 10 or 12 folks to function.”
“And the animatronics may discover a method to depart the pizzeria,” he provides, “which is a giant deal.”
However wait, I say, didn’t the titular Freddy exit the pizzeria within the first film?
“Sure, however there’s, like, sure guidelines of the sport that —” he says, his voice slowing down and elevating in pitch with every successive phrase. “It’s murky. And I don’t totally get it, however I do know it’s a giant deal that the animatronics that depart, depart. It’s a complete factor.”
When Hutcherson signed on to the primary “Freddy’s,” he didn’t actually grasp the scale of the “completely rabid fan base” for the mid-2010s video video games that impressed the movies “till after the film got here out.” However as he talks about capturing the sequel — directed as soon as once more by Emma Tammi, and written by the sport’s creator, Scott Cawthon — I get the sensation that Hutcherson remains to be merely alongside for the trip.
Josh Hutcherson and director Emma Tammi on the set of “5 Nights at Freddy’s 2”
Ryan Inexperienced / Common Footage / Courtesy Everett Assortment
“The primary focus is making one thing that the FNAF fandom will go loopy for,” he says, saying the acronym because the followers do: “fuh-naff.” “Generally I’m like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense! How can I probably do that?’ And so they’re like, ‘It’s from the sport.’” He begins laughing as he places up his fingers in give up. “‘All proper, all proper, all proper, I’m on board, I’m on board.’ However it’s loopy.”
Satisfying the exacting expectations of a vocal fanbase is actually acquainted territory for Hutcherson, after spending half a decade with Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth contained in the “Starvation Video games” maelstrom. As his time with that franchise was coming to an finish with 2015’s “The Starvation Video games: Mockingjay – Half 2,” Hutcherson says he went by way of a part the place he wished completely nothing to do with it. “I used to be like, ‘Fuck that,’” he says matter-of-factly. “I obtained thrust into a spot of notoriety that I by no means dreamed of, by no means wished. It took privateness from me.”
To this present day, Hutcherson avoids crowded public locations, together with in Madrid, and strangers yelling “Peeta” at him is a each day prevalence. However he’s grown to understand all the things that “The Starvation Video games” has offered him, a lot in order that his face lights up once I carry up the prospect of constructing one other movie with the core workforce, together with director Francis Lawrence and co-star Woody Harrelson. “I might love to be again on set with Francis, with Jen, with Liam, with Woody,” he says. “It could not take any convincing in any respect. I’d be there in a heartbeat.”
There’s an opportunity that might occur prior to one could count on. Francis Lawrence is in manufacturing on an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel “Dawn on the Reaping,” which chronicles the Starvation Video games expertise from the attitude of Harrelson’s character Haymitch Abernathy when he was 16 — and ends with an epilogue set after the occasions of “Mockingjay,” that includes Haymitch, Peeta and collection heroine Katniss Everdeen.
Hutcherson discovered of that coda solely because the ebook hit cabinets in March. So, I ask, is he within the new film?
He breaks into an enormous grin. “That will be a dream come true,” he says, holding my gaze.
I’m not fairly certain what you’re making an attempt to speak to me, I say.
“It could be a dream come true,” he repeats. “Do desires come true? Generally. Generally not. Generally, yeah.”
Selome Hailu contributed to this story.
