Cinema Blend talked with Josh Hutcherson about The Hunger Games.

It’s kind of a big question to start, but I have to ask: are you ready for this?

I don’t think there’s any way to get ready for it. I’m just taking it day by day and it’s exciting, you know? To be part of something so highly anticipated, and it’s the first time for me and I’m very passionate about the story and the movie. I just saw the movie last weekend and that just reassured me of this whole thing and I loved it. I’m very proud to be a part of it.

How have the mall tours been going?

It was crazy. There were 2,000 people there – I think there were 1,000 there four hours before we were going to get there. So it was incredible for me to see that kind of support. And as an actor your goal is to be successful and with success comes notoriety in this business. And it’s kind of weird because in my mind I never really put two and two together somehow. I just wanted to become successful, I didn’t realize that that came with it at the same time. So it’s a whole different side of it. It’s fun and it’s exciting and it’s very, very, very different.

Is it strange that you’re still three weeks out from release are you’re already seeing this incredible surge?

It is weird. When we first started shooting there was 8 million copies of the book and now there’s 20 something million copies of the book, so it’s grown so much since we first started. But yeah, the saga has been building for so long and now we’re ready for it to come out.

To talk a bit about Peeta, 20 years ago if you there had been a movie like this made it would have featured a male lead and female supporting characters. But here it’s the alpha female, beta male. I was hoping you could talk a bit about that perspective.

I think Peeta’s strong in his own way. That’s something that myself and Gary Ross and Suzanne Collins talked about often was making sure Peeta works cinematically and by that I mean I think he has a little bit more backbone. In the book he’s a great character, but obviously can come across as a little soft sometimes and I think that cinematically he’s much more interesting because he has a bit more backbone. So I think that a few scenes in the cave scene with Jennifer we really wanted to add in a little bit more strength to his character and instead of being kind of sappy with it he’s coming from a place of, “I could die, I need to tell you how I feel about this.” Katniss is such a strong character and the story is obviously told from her perspective, so I think that anybody who is a strong woman can relate to that, and strong women can be with a strong man and it works out that way. But it is different and that could be why it’s so important to people because it’s something that they haven’t seen before