It has officially been ten years since The Hunger Games hit theaters and one of the unmistakable highlights of the franchise to this day is Josh Hutcherson and Jennifer Lawrence’s relationship on screen as Peeta and Katniss and real-life friendship off screen. The actors who both hail from Kentucky got to go on an incredible journey together as the stars of the franchise and have some fun stories about their time on the movies.
There’s an especially great one that happened on the set of the first Hunger Games movie that Josh Hutcherson didn’t let Jennifer Lawrence live down the last time he reflected on the franchise. As the actor shared:
She was being a real show-off, thinking that she was Jackie Chan or something. [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.
Oops. While speaking to Yahoo!, Hutcherson recalled being knocked out by his co-star while they were shooting the original Hunger Games film. As Josh Hutcherson shared in 2020, Jennifer Lawrence actually gave him a mild concussion just a few weeks into shooting the first movie that would go on to make nearly $700 million worldwide. He shared what happened when he regained consciousness with these words:
She was crying. She felt terrible. I woke up with her [crying], laying over me.
While that must have really hurt at the time, it’s a great story in hindsight that Josh Hutcherson can laugh off nowadays. The co-stars still remain in contact, with Hutcherson last sharing that the pair met up during quarantine to have dinner together.
Jennifer Lawrence gave birth to her first child last month with her gallerist husband Cooke Maroney and recently made her comeback to film with 2022 Best Picture nominee Don’t Look Up alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Meryl Streep. Jennifer Lawrence has a number of upcoming projects as well such as being the second woman to portray Elizabeth Holmes following Amanda Seyfried’s The Dropout series. Hutcherson has recently starred in a couple TV shows, such as Hulu’s Future Man and Netflix’s Ultraman.
The pair filmed all four Hunger Games movies together between 2011 and 2014. The franchise made both Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson massive names, but in Hutcherson’s instance, he’d already been recognizable as a child star from Bridge to Terebithia, Zathura and the Oscar-nominated film The Kids Are All Right.
The franchise is expected to return in the form of author Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes, which is getting a movie adaptation after being a bestseller. The Hunger Games movies are currently avaliable to revisit with a Hulu subscription.
