Josh Hutcherson: 'Everybody Has Roles They Wanted and Didn't Get'

What a difference a few months make. When we profiled Josh Hutcherson in The Verge last August, he was a promising young actor in two low-profile films that failed to do much business. This year, though, his career has taken off with a bang: not only was he heavily considered to play the title character in the reboot of Spider-Man, but the 17-year-old has supplanted Brendan Fraser as the star of their franchise, Journey to the Center of the Earth. And then there's Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right: as Laser, the young son who spurs his mothers (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) to meet the sperm donor who fathered him, Hutcherson turns in a winning performance in one of the best films of the year.

Last month, I sat down with the up-and-comer to discuss how shocked he was that people found Kids to be a comedy, what exactly is going on with the troubled remake of Red Dawn, and how he feels when he loses out on a major role (in what turned out to be a prescient conversation).

Lisa says you're not at all like Laser in real life. How so?

I'm definitely more outgoing and more confident than Laser, I think. Laser's kind of going through an identity crisis -- he's figuring out who he is and how he fits into the world and his family. I'm still doing that as well, but I think that he's definitely more insecure than I am.

So how do you tap into that?

Lisa wrote the characters spectacularly, so playing them wasn't as hard as they normally would be, because she's incredible. As an actor, you're always playing different people, so you yourself are always kind of going through an identity crisis. [Laughs] It makes it easier to tap into that insecurity, I think.

I think it's interesting that Laser is the one who really wants to meet his father, Paul, yet when he does, he almost becomes bashful and retreats from it.

Definitely.

Why do you think that is?

For me, I think he just wants to keep his guard up at that point. He's not sure who Paul is, he doesn't want to let him into his life too much because he doesn't want to get hurt. He's definitely still giving Paul a chance -- he just wants to find out who he is first.

Is Paul who he had pictured?

Not at all. I think Laser had pictured some big athlete or sports guy, because Laser loves sports and he figures he must have gotten it from his dad. Then he finds this indie, grunge kind of guy who owns his restaurant and is being all organic. He's like, "What? All right, different, but I'll go with it."

He's very Silver Lake.

[Laughs] Yeah. Very Silver Lake.

Annette and Julianne were both intent on developing character backgrounds and family histories for this role. Since you play their kid, were you involved in devising all that backstory?

I didn't have any conversations with them about that. For me and Mia [Wasikowska] at least, we both have siblings, so that whole sibling thing is very easy for us to tap into. We had a week or two of rehearsals before we started shooting, and in that time, Lisa just wanted us to be together as a family. So we just kind of practiced being together. It was so easy, because we all come from such good, solid families, and that's what this movie is about: a solid family.

Do you often get that kind of rehearsal time?

It depends. Sometimes, on a small film like this, you don't always have time for a rehearsal, so I'm thankful that we got that week to get to know each other a lot. So many times, you're thrown into a situation where they say, "OK, this person's been your best friend since forever. You know everything about him. Here he is." You just have to be, "Uh, OK. Let's do it." So it's good to have that time to get to know somebody. I've been on projects before where there's no rehearsal, and you walk in on set and that's literally the first time you've ever played the character, and then I've had times where there's been three weeks of rehearsal. I like both. There's actually something interesting about having no rehearsal time -- you have to just walk in and go with your gut, which is exciting.

You're not nervous that you have so little time to get it right on a movie like this?

Oh yeah. We were shooting six pages a day sometimes, which is ridiculous. It was definitely intimidating, but because it was so crazy and we were shooting nonstop the entire time, it gave us this really awesome energy of not thinking about our characters too much. We kind of just did it -- we existed as our characters the entire time.

Were you at the Sundance premiere?

Yeah, that was my first time seeing it, actually. I was blown away. It's funny, because when I read the script, and through the entire time I was filming it, I thought it was a drama. I had no idea it was a comedy, right? All of a sudden I sit down at Sundance and I say, "Wait, this [program] says it's a comedy," and I go to the screening, and it's hilarious. What's really cool about it -- and maybe this is the reason I didn't think it would be a comedy -- is that there's no jokes. There's no setup, punchline, ta-dah. It's all situational comedy and finding the humor in everyday life.

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