Josh Hutcherson talks about the failure he felt after ‘The Hunger Games’: “I wasn’t getting any offers”
The star of ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ has spoken about his rise to fame.
Every up-and-coming actor dreams of appearing in a major franchise to make a name for themselves in the Hollywood industry, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
Josh Hutcherson, who starred in the successful dystopian saga ‘The Hunger Games’ and recently dominated the box office with ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s 2’, has spoken about the professional difficulties he experienced with the end of the franchise created by Suzanne Collins: “I never learned what rejection was. I only knew success, from age 9 to 24,” he explained on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast.
After a prolific career as a child actor, which included titles such as ‘The Polar Express’, ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’, and ‘The Kids Are All Right’, Hutcherson landed the role of Peeta Mellark at 18, which catapulted him to fame. “The industry is very complicated, because it tells you: ‘You’ve made it. Now you’re working with Jennifer Lawrence and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and you’re in this movie that’s making billions of dollars, you’re the second lead,’” he recalls.
And yet, he points out that in Hollywood, “however excited they are to introduce you, they don’t want to give you anything else”: “It’s very complicated. So I experienced my first sense of disappointment, failure, and rejection, probably when I was about 24 or 25 years old,” explains the actor, who has shared that despite belonging to one of the most profitable franchises in the industry, there was a time when he wasn’t receiving offers or getting auditions.
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“I’d had a career since I was nine. It had always worked out. I’d always been cast. Sure, there are roles you don’t get, but I knew that if I auditioned, chances were I’d get the part. That’s not the reality at all,” he shared. Despite this setback in his career, Hutcherson has bounced back with the horror franchise directed by Emma Taimi, ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s,’ an independent project that smashed box office records in 2023 and is now breaking records with its sequel.
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