Josh Hutcherson Spills on Kristen Stewart Crush, His Relationship with Jennifer Lawrence and a Very Creepy Fan Encounter

Josh Hutcherson joined Dax Shepard for a new Armchair Expert podcast this week to reflect on growing up in the spotlight, dropping a few gems about working on "The Hunger Games" and finding fame after its success while he did it.

Shepard began by taking it back to the beginning, asking the actor about working on the 2005 film "Zathura," which also starred Dax himself and a young Kristen Stewart.

"She was the coolest person I ever met," Hutcherson said of his female co-star. "It was a big time crush at the time. 100 percent."

Hutcherson actually celebrated his 12th birthday at a bowling alley during filming, a party he invited Stewart to. "Kristen came, she kind of walks up to me and she has her hands behind her back," he recalled. "I was like, 'Am I going to get kissed?' She brings her hands out and she's got a turtle. She's like, 'Yeah, they live to be 85. He's less than 1.'"

Sadly, that present didn't exactly last its lifespan. "It's been dead for a while," Hutcherson told Shepard.

The 26-year-old "Future Man" star went on to talk about how he had his first kiss while filming "Little Manhattan," and had an "innocent" relationship with AnnaSophia Robb when they worked together on "The Bridge to Terebithia." But when it came to his "Hunger Games" co-star Jennifer Lawrence, there were no romantic sparks whatsoever.

Shepard asked if he made it a plan to "get this girl to fall in love with me," but Hutcherson said "that was not the dynamic at all." In fact, it was more of a brother-sister kinda thing, "from the beginning."

He recalled how they first met at the SAG Awards, before being cast together in the film. "She was a girl from Kentucky, I'm from Kentucky," he explained, "and she came to me like, 'I'm Jennifer, nice to meet you and I just want to tell you when I was a kid and I wanted to start acting, you had done it and you were in the newspaper in Kentucky and my parents told me I couldn't be an actor, so I showed them a newspaper of you succeeding and told them I could do it too if you did it.'"

Of their relationship, he added, "It never got confusing or blurred or weird or anything like that. Genuinely, for me, that was so much better than having had some romantic thing. I'll tell you why, because now she's a friend of mine and there's nothing that has tainted that friendship."

After the two stepped into their roles as Peeta Mellark and Katniss "The Girl on Fire" Everdeen, they both found themselves thrust into the spotlight more than ever before.

The first inkling he had reached a new level of fame came at a fan event at a Los Angeles before they even started filming the first movie. "I just remember this moment, we were sitting in this waiting room and there were so many people there with signs of Peeta and Katniss, 'Put a bun in my oven,' things like that," he explained. "I remember looking out at that and looking at Jen and Liam [Hemsworth] ... like what the hell are we stepping into? It was a massive, life changing experience."

By the time the second movie came out, "Hunger Games" mania had fully set in. Here's when things really started to get weird, however. Hutcherson recalled having dinner at his parents' house on December 23, two days before Christmas, when they got a knock on the front door. His father answered, only to find a mother and her two daughters standing there. They had driven from Chicago to Kentucky, hoping Josh would be home for the holidays.

Hutcherson said his dad was "rattled," and although he told Shepard "shame on the parents," Josh still came out, said hello to the two young girls and took photos with them.

"I did not enjoy the attention, I did not enjoy the fame, there was not an ounce of me that liked people looking at me," he added. "Looking back on it now, I am so grateful and I genuinely enjoyed the entire process."