Kids in movies tend to fall on two extremes. There’s the Haley Joel Osment way to mature for his own age roles, or the annoyingly cute Hollywood robot kids. Rare are the kids who actually act like kids, with all the depth and simplicity childhood brings. Bridge to Terabithia lets Josh Hutcherson do just that.
Hutcherson's Adventures in Bridge to Terabithia
“It’s great, especially with Jess, my character because he’s such a real kid,” said Hutcherson. “He has all of these real kid problems. He’s bullied at school, he has a crush on his teacher, his home life with his family isn’t great, unfortunately. I mean, mine is. I’ve always grown up with a great relationship with my parents and my parents are like a friend to me as well. [It’s] just that is very good for me to play a character who is different from what I am. It’s fun for me to get to portray different characters.”
The story follows glorious fantasy and life’s tragedies as two friends find refuge in their imaginary playland. It was all juicy for the actor. “There were a lot of great scenes and that’s one of the reasons I loved playing Jess because he had so many great scenes. It’s such a rich role for an actor to get to play. I got to show such a wide range of emotions. I actually worked with Gabor, the director about two weeks before, working on the character arc going from shy and timid and kind of hurt into this new kid that he kind of is where he’s open about the world and he’s letting his imagination run wild. I love being able to play different diverse characters.”
Imagining the fantasy world of Terabithia was hard, considering his previous special effects work was on a real crumbling space house in Zathura. “It was hard. They built it for us after we already imagined it. It was difficult because we had to pretend that these characters were jumping out after us and we had to dodge and dive and hit things that weren’t even there. Sometimes we were lucky to even get a tennis ball to react to, but with the help of Gabor the director and the producers and everyone, they kind of helped us paint a picture of what it was going to be like afterwards in our head.”
Luckily, there was some previous material to go on. “I read the book when I found out it was getting made into a movie. When I read it, I totally fell in love with it and as I was reading it, I could so picture the movie coming to life on the pages.”
Bridge to Terabithia opens to theatres on February 16th.
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