Josh Hutcherson, the Hollywood actor who speak Spanish with a Madrid accent
He landed his first role at nine and was riding the success of ‘The Hunger Games’ when the calls suddenly stopped. Now he splits his time between the Spanish capital and Los Angeles and has a slate of new projects underway
Many people know him for his role as Peeta Mellark in the hit Hunger Games saga; many others for playing Jess Aarons in Bridge to Terabithia; and there are even those who remember his brief cameo as Ryan in the Spanish series Paquita Salas. Behind all these characters is Josh Hutcherson, 33, an actor who has spent practically his entire life in front of the camera and who has managed to shape his career on his own terms, without letting anyone else do it for him and steering clear of the Hollywood‑star stereotype.
But it hasn’t all been easy: he went from being in constant demand to suddenly not getting any calls. Now that period seems to be behind him, and his schedule is once again full of new projects, among them the third installment of another franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s, and the series I Love LA.
Hutcherson was four years old when he told his parents he wanted to be an actor, and nine when — entirely on his own initiative — he called an acting agency looking for a part in a film (his first was House Blend, in 2002). His parents let him attend those acting classes, where he was encouraged to travel to Los Angeles for an audition. The rest is history.
“I was relentless in my drive, even as a kid,” he explained in an interview on Great Day Houston. “In this industry, being a kid is very tough [...] I’ve unfortunately witnessed a lot of kids who didn’t want to be there, but were there because their parents wanted them there. [...] Thankfully my parents supported me and I got to have the dreams realized that I had as a young kid.”
In another interview, with The New York Times this past December, he shared more about what it was like to be a young actor: “I never wanted to leave set. When they told me that my nine and a half hours were up for the day, I would cry. [...] I just loved that whole world, and I still do to this day.”
By the time he was 18, he had already starred in films such as Little Manhattan (2005), Zathura: A Space Adventure (2005), Bridge to Terabithia (2007), Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), and The Kids Are All Right (2010), among others. In 2012 came the role of his life — the one that would define him, for better and for worse: Peeta in The Hunger Games, the humble baker’s assistant chosen at random to fight against 23 other tributes. Three more installments would follow. “There was this big promise after Hunger Games of what your career is going to be, and it never happened," he told The New York Times. “I’ve experienced how fleeting it is.”
What he hadn’t felt as a child, he lived firsthand at the height of his career: “From age 23 or 24 to almost 30, I wasn’t getting the kinds of roles that I wanted or cast in the things I was auditioning for. It was a brutal few years,” he said. “It was a hard lesson to learn that late in the game.”
Hutcherson never aimed high because he had already fulfilled his dream: “I’ve never been like ‘I want to win an Oscar,’ or ‘I want to make millions of dollars.’ I just wanted to make interesting projects and find ways to challenge myself. I’ve seen people that get it all, and it’s like, ‘OK, then what?’ For me, I thought I made it the day I got cast in my first job when I was nine years old,” he said in the December interview.
He was always aware that rejection is a normal part of the acting world: many actors, not nearly as many roles. “It was just like a string of no one calling, not getting any offers, auditioning but not getting cast,” he said on the podcast Dinner’s On Me.
He knew he didn’t want to be boxed into one type of character, but The Hunger Games saga ended up closing many doors for him. “Those auteur filmmakers or indie creatives that I was dying to work with, I wasn’t really on their radar because I was in this other category as Peeta,” he told The New York Times. "I said no to a lot of things that were the nice guy, the golden boy. I rebelled against the industry."
In 2023, eight years after the release of the final film in the dystopian series, the opportunity he had been waiting for finally arrived: joining Five Nights at Freddy’s. Since then, he has been working nonstop and now has more than nine projects lined up for the coming years.
Over the past decade, the actor has split his time between Los Angeles and Madrid. Since 2014, he has been in a low‑profile relationship with Spanish actress Claudia Traisac, whom he met while filming Escobar: Paradise Lost. Although his permanent home is in Silver Lake, as he revealed in a recent interview with Interview, he also spends long stretches in the Spanish capital with his partner.
“It’s really funny, because I’m a white kid from Kentucky and suddenly I’m speaking with a Madrid accent. A lot of times, when I’m somewhere and people are speaking Spanish and don’t know that I understand them, I hear them say, ‘Is that him?’, ‘What’s his name?’, ‘He’s in that movie…’. I really love speaking Spanish,” he said on the Uforia Music Podcast.
Although he speaks it fluently, he hasn’t yet considered using it on screen: “I’m very comfortable, I understand everything, and I handle the language really well, but acting… I don’t know, it makes me a bit nervous. I’m afraid of acting in another language,” he told Los 40.
In addition to acting, he has also begun exploring music production. “I play a little bit of guitar and a little bit of keyboard, but in the last few years, I’ve been trying to produce some more music. My girlfriend and I have a little music project that we’re working on together. We’ve also scored a couple of short films,” he revealed in Interview.
Hutcherson has spent nearly 25 years acting and has experienced the ups and downs of the profession. He has never shied away from his past, and there are even rumors he may return in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. “I don’t want to be a piece in someone else’s game. Over the years, it’s been about not letting myself get caught up in the rat race of Hollywood, like you need to get this brand deal, and you have to go to seven events this week because you have to be seen. I’ll do things when I need to promote something, but I’m not going to play that game,” he told The New York Times.
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