Josh Hutcherson cocks his head to one side.

The actor best known for playing Peeta Mellark in The Hunger Games franchise, returning this month with the penultimate episode Mockingjay - Part 1, is considering a rather philosophical question.

"Do I believe in destiny? I don't think so," he says. "I don't think right now I'm on a path and I'm going to get to where I'm going no matter what. I don't believe that. I think you create your own destiny, and you make decisions, and you can go one direction or another direction."

It's a fair assumption, given how his life has turned out so far. The Kentucky native was just four years old when he announced to his parents that he wanted to be an actor. Five years later, aged just 9, he was on the phone to an agent in Los Angeles hustling for work. Destiny, it seems, was truly in his hands. "You could say those decisions are predetermined by destiny, but for my personal belief, I think that people have freedom of choice."

Sitting with his leg up on a chair, he's wearing black jeans and a striped jumper; there's a tattoo on his wrist too. "It's a Libra sign," he explains, "and a star for each of my family members." That would be younger brother Connor and mother Michelle, a former flight attendant, and father Chris, an analyst for the US Environmental Protection Agency. As for his astrological inking, does that mean he's as balanced as those scales? "I try to be!" he laughs.

Certainly he comes across this way, entirely at ease with his ever-ballooning fame (he has 2.7 million followers on Twitter). I ask what he feels his turning points are so far.

"Getting my first movie was the biggest thing for me," he says; while he was only in a small role, the 2003 film was the rather splendid American Splendor, in which Paul Giamatti played the real-life grumpy comic-book creator Harvey Pekar. A year later, he was starring with Tom Hanks (or at least his body movements and facial expressions were, via motion capture) in the computer-generated adventure The Polar Express.

For the next few years, Hutcherson continued with the family-friendly fare - films like Zathura: A Space Adventure, Bridge to Terabithia, and the remake of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. It wasn't until 2010, however, that he showed adult ambitions; the film was The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's tale of a lesbian couple - played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening - whose two children, conceived by artificial insemination, search for their biological father.

"I think Kids Are All Right was a huge turning point for me, because that put me in a crowd of a much older audience. Before, I had more family movies. So getting into an older audience and working with incredible actors and being around Oscar people - still people talk about that movie. So that was a huge thing." He pauses. "And obviously, there was this little movie called The Hunger Games, that was a pretty huge change."

Ah, yes, that little film; the first two instalments, adapted from the runaway YA books by Suzanne Collins, have together grossed $1.5 billion. Now, Collins' final book Mockingjay is upon us - though fans will have to wait for another year to see the conclusion, with the story being split into two films - much in the way the final Twilight and Harry Potter books were divided into two movies by greedy producers.

In the films, Hutcherson's character Peeta emerges as the on/off love interest to Jennifer Lawrence's Katniss Everdeen - both competitors in the so-called Hunger Games, a televised fight to the death held in the futuristic totalitarian land of Panem.

But as Mockingjay kicks off, with Katniss now being groomed as a figurehead for a growing rebellion, Peeta has been captured and coerced into denouncing the revolution on live television.

"In Hunger Games, my character does have a good arc," says Hutcherson. "It's not like I'm stuck doing the same benign thing over and over. The first two movies were a little boring for me, but then the next two movies, Peeta goes on a crazy ride."

He certainly sounds relieved to have somewhat escaped the shadow of Lawrence's character (something his male co-star Liam Hemsworth, who plays Gale, has yet to manage); and in Mockingjay - Part 1, he gets one wonderful, eye-bulging moment.

Hutcherson isn't about to decry his meal ticket, though. "Since Hunger Games, I've got a lot more scripts of different sorts," he says. He recently completed Escobar: Paradise Lost, playing a tourist who gets caught up with notorious Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar (played by Benicio Del Toro).

"Working on a studio film, you can get lazy. Everything is slow. You have a lot of time. You have money to spend on the movie. On this film, you didn't have money, you didn't have time, you had to go, go, go."

He'd worked before with Del Toro, who directed him in a short film for the anthology 7 Days In Havana. And there was one other bonus: he met Spanish co-star Claudia Traisac, who plays Escobar's niece, and they've been dating since. So how was his Spanish? "Non-existent," he grins. "But she's been helping me understand some things a little better." Of course, meeting Traisac on the set - that wasn't destiny, right?

l The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 opens today.