Josh Hutcherson on Hunger Games Return and Five Nights at Freddys 2

The agent defined that Rachel Sennott, the buzzy star of indie hits “Bottoms” and “Shiva Baby,” was launching her first comedy sequence with HBO, and he or she needed Hutcherson to play her character’s boyfriend. But it was going to start out capturing in roughly two weeks, and the present’s eventual title doubled as its location: “I Love L.A.”

It was the cellphone name that Hutcherson had spent years ready to get. He’d been appearing since he was 9; he’d landed his first starring position at 13, in “Zathura: A Space Adventure”; he had a key supporting position in 2010 greatest image nominee “The Kids Are All Right” at 16; and when he was 18, he was catapulted into world superstardom when he was forged as Peeta Mellark in “The Hunger Games.” But as Hutcherson drifted towards 30, the roles began to dry up.

“I went through a few years where it was kind of slim pickings, and I wasn’t doing much,” he says quietly, swirling his espresso cup outdoors a bistro in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood. “A lot of young actors don’t make the transition, or the industry kicks them out. I was kind of like, is this the time where I’m over it and done?”

Instead, at 33, Hutcherson is getting into a brand new profession peak. On Dec. 5, he’ll star in Blumhouse’s “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” tailored from the feverishly standard online game franchise — the primary “Freddy’s” film was an sudden hit in 2023, grossing $292 million worldwide. And after scrambling to get out of his NYC lease, he did certainly be a 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 always wanted to do an HBO comedy on Sunday night. That, to me, is a dream come true.”

On “I Love L.A.” — which premiered on Nov. 2, runs by means 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 out to be a expertise supervisor brings into his life.

“I grew up watching him in ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ and ‘The Hunger Games,’ and there’s something about him, how warm and lovely he is,” Sennott instructed Variety in October. “I was so impressed by his comedic and improv chops. But also, for audiences, I think you see him and you feel like he’s your boyfriend a little.”

Hutcherson smiles once I inform him Sennott’s reasoning for casting him. “I am 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 just lately by enjoying the poisonous tech bro villain within the 2024 Jason Statham motion movie “The Beekeeper.” But with “I Love L.A.,” Hutcherson says he was “happy to lean into” his Good Guy persona. “If it got me on set and shooting this with Rachel — it’s meant to be.”

Part of the attraction have been the times through the eight-week shoot when Hutcherson actually walked to work. “The first script mentioned Erewhon and Tenants of the Trees and the reservoir,” he says, ticking off landmarks of L.A.’s Eastside. “That’s my circuit. That’s where I’ve been haunting for years.”

He additionally felt at dwelling as the one character on the present who isn’t obsessive about breaking into present enterprise. “Even though I’ve been doing this since I was 9, and I’m so wildly in this industry, I don’t feel like I am in so many ways,” he says. “I don’t go to events unless I need to be there. I’m not active on social media unless the studio is like, we need you to be. I’ve always been one foot in, one foot out. When I started, I didn’t have a hunger for becoming famous; I just wanted to make movies and TV shows. I feel like that aligns with Dylan. He just wants to exist and do something he cares about.”

The probability to play an on a regular basis grownup dwelling on this planet because it exists in 2025 is uncommon for any actor proper now, and Hutcherson doesn’t take it without any consideration. “I’ve grown up working with tennis balls and green screens,” he says. “I don’t have to try to convince the audience that we’re, like, X amount of years in the future in a dystopic society or that these animatronics are possessed by ghost children.”

He’s referring, in fact, to the “Freddy’s” films, which revolve round a creepy, long-shuttered pizzeria joint à la Chuck E. Cheese and its homicidal robotic animal mascots which are embodied by the spirits of murdered youngsters. The elaborate animatronic costumes created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop could be worn by the performers just for half-hour at a time earlier than the load and warmth turn out to be overwhelming. And after they do have the costumes on, there’s no assure they’re going to work proper.

“The stunt actor has to turn and look to the right, but then three people with remote controls have to make the eyes time with the blink,” Hutcherson says. “You’ll do 10 takes, because the animatronic movement isn’t quite working. That one take that the animatronic is perfect, you better be perfect too, because that’s the one that’s going in the movie.”

The sequel, Hutcherson estimates, has “more than double” the creatures from the primary movie, certainly one of which, the character known as Mangle, requires “a team of 10 or 12 people to operate.”

“Yes, but there’s, like, certain rules of the game that —” he says, his voice slowing down and elevating in pitch with every successive phrase. “It’s murky. And I don’t fully get it, but I know it’s a big deal that the animatronics that leave, leave. It’s a whole thing.”

When Hutcherson signed on to the primary “Freddy’s,” he didn’t actually grasp the dimensions of the “absolutely rabid fan base” for the mid-2010s video video games that impressed the movies “until after the movie came out.” But 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 continues to be merely alongside for the trip.

“The main focus is making something that the FNAF fandom will go crazy for,” he says, announcing the acronym because the followers do: “fuh-naff.” “Sometimes I’m like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense! How can I possibly do this?’ And they’re like, ‘It’s from the game.’” He begins laughing as he places up his arms in give up. “‘All right, all right, all right, I’m on board, I’m on board.’ But it’s crazy.”

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 “Hunger Games” maelstrom. As his time with that franchise was coming to an finish with 2015’s “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2,” Hutcherson says he went by means of a part the place he needed completely nothing to do with it. “I was like, ‘Fuck that,’” he says matter-of-factly. “I got thrust into a place of notoriety that I never dreamed of, never wanted. It took privacy from me.”

To at the present time, Hutcherson avoids crowded public locations, together with in Madrid, and strangers yelling “Peeta” at him is a every day incidence. But he’s grown to understand every thing that “The Hunger Games” has offered him, a lot in order that his face lights up once I carry up the prospect of creating one other movie with the core workforce, together with director Francis Lawrence and co-star Woody Harrelson. “I would love to be back on set with Francis, with Jen, with Liam, with Woody,” he says. “It would not take any convincing at all. I’d be there in a heartbeat.”

There’s an opportunity that might occur earlier than one might count on. Francis Lawrence is in manufacturing on an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel “Sunrise on the Reaping,” which chronicles the Hunger Games expertise from the angle 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 sequence heroine Katniss Everdeen.

Selome Hailu contributed to this story.