Josh Hutcherson: The person who inspired Jennifer Lawrence to become an actor
After several promising roles throughout her teen years, Jennifer Lawrence caught a significant tailwind in 2011, starring as the blue mutant Mystique in the X-Men franchise. This success was followed a year later by her career-defining lead role in the first of the immensely popular Hunger Games movies.
In the franchise, Lawrence stars opposite Josh Hutcherson. Although Hutcherson was two years younger than Lawrence, he was more experienced, having established himself as a child star through the 2000s in movies such as The Polar Express, Howl’s Moving Castle and Zathura: A Space Adventure.
As a child, Lawrence has watched Hutcherson in several movies and was incidentally inspired by him to become an actor herself. During a 2020 interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Hutcherson remembered the first time he met Lawrence for the first Hunger Games movie.
“She came over to me and told me this story about how when she was about ten years old, she had seen in a local newspaper in Kentucky that this young actor had gone out to California… to become an actor, and that was me,” Hutcherson remembered. “And she showed that to her parents and was like, ‘Look, I want to do this, too. This kid [is] doing it.’ So it’s crazy that we ended up doing these movies together.”
Later in the interview, Hutcherson also remembered a funny yet painful moment early on in their friendship. “She was being a real show-off, thinking that she was Jackie Chan or something,” Hutcherson continued. “[She was] throwing these air kicks and was like, ‘Josh, I can kick over your head!’ And then crack! She clipped me in the temple… I don’t really remember because I got knocked out.”
When a dazed Hutcherson came around again, Lawrence “was crying,” he recalled. “She felt terrible. I woke up with her [crying], laying over me.”
Although Hutcherson got to work alongside the likes of Lawrence, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland and more, he described the Hunger Games project as a “double-edged sword”.
“You can become boxed in as an actor, professionally,” he explained. “And that’s tough, and people can only see you as that character, and it’s hard for them to imagine you in something else. And that’s difficult, and that takes time and years of overcoming it.”
Following the first Hunger Games movie, Lawrence won the ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award in 2013 for her role in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. Aged just 22 at the time, the unprecedented launch to fame brought new pressures.
“I lost a sense of control between Hunger Games coming out and winning the Oscar,” Lawrence said, reflecting on her rollercoaster acting journey at the BFI London Film Festival in 2022. “I felt like every decision was a big group decision. I think of those following years as a loss of control and then a reaction to try and get that back.”
“I felt like more of a celebrity than an actor,” she added in a later interview with The New York Times, “cut off from my creativity, my imagination. I found out that a lot of filmmakers that I really loved and admired had scripts that weren’t even reaching me. I had let myself be hijacked.”
Fortunately, Lawrence managed to take back control after leaving her agency, CAA, in 2018. Over the past few years, she has been busy establishing her production company, Excellent Cadaver. In September 2022, the company’s debut production, Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway, saw Lawrence return to career comfort in independent cinema.
Watch the trailer for Causeway below.
