It’s around noon in the Rancho Park neighborhood of Los Angeles as Liam Hemsworth, the 22-year-old star of The Hunger Games, greets me in the parking lot of a public golf course for a round of par 3. He’s filling me in on his morning, which included sleeping late, borrowing Miley Cyrus’ black SL550 Mercedes (she’s his girlfriend of two and a half years), and taking it to the drive-thru for a hamburger with mayo-onion dressing, this rising actor’s breakfast of champions.

“I’m not even hungover, but I was super-super-super-hungry,” Liam says, proudly pointing at the crumpled wrapper and bag on the floor of the Disney Queen of Tween’s $100,000 convertible.

He is six feet three with Malibu-blond hair, azure-blue eyes, and the laid-back vibe of a 2012 Hollister-clad Jeff Spicoli. In short: the all-American surf look Hollywood now imports from Australia (see: Worthington, Sam; Kwanten, Ryan). Three years ago, Hemsworth was a high-school dropout living with his parents, and his idea of a big Friday night was renting idiot comedies like Drop Dead Fred. He worked for his brother’s flooring company, earning $15 an hour, which he points out was more than most of his friends were making. Then, after taping a script reading, he got a call from Sylvester Stallone and headed for L.A., where he landed and then lost parts in a slew of big-budget action flicks. b>Six months later, he started dating Miley. Soon reps from Oakley were flying him to Sundance just to present him with the latest snowboarding swag (“We didn’t see a single movie!” he brags). Next came the inevitable TMZ “gotcha” moment—caught on tape in a fracas outside a nightclub, sticking up for a friend and shouting in a bouncer’s face, “I was backing you up! I was backing you up!” Then he scored a coveted part in The Hunger Games, setting off mass fanboy and -girl hysteria and a new rush of Hollywood offers.

It’s no shock that the clerk is clueless. He likely doesn’t surf celeb-gossip blogs like Just Jared Jr. (MILEY CYRUS & LIAM HEMSWORTH RUN TO RALPH’S) or Perez Hilton (MILEY CYRUS AND LIAM HEMSWORTH DECORATE THEIR CHRISTMAS TREE!) or leaf through Us Weekly (LIAM HEMSWORTH, MILEY CYRUS: WHAT’S COOKIN’, GOOD-LOOKIN’?). And it’s a good bet he didn’t see Liam’s biggest film to date, Disney’s The Last Song. But if the Hype Machine is to be believed, Liam is about to be side-of-a-lunchbox famous thanks to The Hunger Games. The megabudget adaptation of the Suzanne Collins series tells the story of a dystopian society where children fight to the death in a reality show. Some 16 million copies of the books have been sold in the U.S., and with the sun setting on Twilight and Voldemort vanquished, there’s a gaping void in the Cineplex for the prepubescent set. The search for the trilogy’s three stars was covered with the kind of breathless anticipation not seen since the hunt for Scarlett O’Hara.

He looks the part of a movie-star-in-waiting, dressed in a white polo that hugs his broad chest and skims the top of his skinny khakis. He stares out at the rolling fairways, his eyes squinting at a hole in the distance. I imagine he’s contemplating what the impending release of The Hunger Games will mean for his career and his relationship with Miley. I am wrong.

“How comedic are squirrels?!” Liam says, a goofy smile spreading across his face as he spots a furry thing scampering across the horizon. “We don’t have squirrels in Australia. The first time I saw a squirrel was at a meeting at Disney. I was like, ‘What the fuck?!’”

“I just had an audition with Miley Cyrus! How funny is that?”

Liam is standing by the first tee recounting what he said to his brother Chris after he got his first break in Hollywood, The Last Song, a weeper about a piano prodigy with Daddy issues who cozies up to a beach-volleyball stud. The moment Liam left the audition room, in 2009, he rushed to meet up with Chris just to laugh about coming face-to-face with the Disney starlet they’d watched on TV—who’d go on to be his onscreen love interest and his offscreen girlfriend—and the absurdity of it all. “We grew up surfing and stuff,” Liam says of his family as he reaches for a pitching wedge. “That’s why we can laugh. This business is ridiculous.”

The Hemsworth clan vacationed at a surf shack on Phillip Island, not far from their modest home on a dirt road in what Aussies call the Bush. It was a 15-minute drive for milk, farther for anything more substantial, and you couldn’t see a single neighbor from the house. Liam’s father is a social-services counselor, and his mother was an English teacher, which meant the Hemsworth boys—Luke, Chris, and Liam—mostly entertained themselves. Liam, the baby of the family (six years Chris’ junior and nine years younger than Luke), was a constant target. His brothers would pile a couple of heavy sweaters on him and give him a head start. “Then we’d stalk him around our backyard with air rifles and shoot him,” Chris says with a laugh. “I feel like the worst brother in the world. But he had a great time, okay?” Liam doesn’t recall it so fondly. “I’d bend over to feed the guinea pigs and I’d get a pellet in the ass out of nowhere,” he says. “It really hurt.”

He pauses to line up his tee shot, then takes the club back and sends the ball sailing. “Yeah-heh!” he cries. “You’re not even supposed to hit that far with the pitching wedge. It’s crazy.”

Then came the audition for The Last Song that he found so laughable. He got the job. And the girl. When Liam and Miley hooked up on the set, he was 19, she was 16—a fact he doesn’t shy away from. “What happened happened, and we’ve been together two and a half years,” he says. “She makes me really happy. When you start, you want to be professional, but when you’re filming those scenes with someone and pretending to love them, you’re not human if you don’t feel something.” When the film wrapped, he went home with her to Nashville, where he was introduced to the joys of Cracker Barrel and Miley’s dad, Billy Ray. “He’s very spiritual,” Liam says of Mr. “Achy Breaky Heart.” “He’s just one of the nicest guys. Very accommodating. I’ve listened to his music since we got together. It’s awesome.” And so is Cracker Barrel. “I’d never heard of country-fried steak before. It’s great! I love fried food.” He’s less keen on another iconic trash-treat, though. “In Australia, we used to always watch Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. I didn’t know it was a real place. Epic.” But he was disillusioned after a trip to a White Castle in Kentucky with his Hunger Games costar Josh Hutcherson. “The movie was better than the burgers,” he says. “We might have thrown up after.”

When Liam returned to L.A. with Miley, he was a paparazzi target by association. And suddenly a hot property. He quickly landed a string of big-budget films, including a 3-D adaptation of Arabian Nights with Anthony Hopkins and a political thriller directed by John Singleton. But just as quickly the projects got delayed or fell apart. Start dates were pushed. Funding dried up. Frustrated, he turned to his brother for advice. “Chris is like, ‘This is when you do the hard work. When you get on set is the easy part. Work your ass off and put the time in for auditions and take it seriously.’” Telling this story today, Liam sounds like a baffled child who’s just realized how much of life is out of his control. “It’s not like I wasn’t working!” he says. “I was booking all the jobs I was going in to audition for.”

And yet Liam didn’t step in front of a camera in 2010. Instead, he and Miley nested, eating sushi most nights (“Sushi is my favorite thing to do in L.A.”). Between bento boxes, he worked out his frustrations at a no-frills boxing gym: “When I’m boxing, if my career isn’t going well, at least I feel mentally and physically strong.”

It’s hard to say how much pressure comes with fronting a franchise, especially when it could transform the guy who’s Thor’s brother and who walks Miley’s dog into Hollywood’s hottest young star. While Liam downplays such expectations, he concedes that he and his Hunger Games character share a certain helplessness. “Gale is someone who wants to stand up to this thing but can’t,” Liam says. “He’s pretty powerless.”

“It went really well. I shot, like, way under what you should shoot. As Liam hands the clerk his clubs, he plays fast and loose with the facts—in actuality, we’ve bagged golfing entirely to go in search of Cajun burgers—showcasing a skill that may serve him well in the coming months: the ability to project a good face when circumstances fall short of expectations.

Our rented clubs returned, we head to Miley’s car. Liam does have his own wheels—he drives a four-door BMW—but he prefers Miley’s Merc because it’s faster: “This one time, we pulled up to a light. This guy started revving his engine at me. I was like, ‘Is he for real?’ The light went green. And vroom—I killed him.” There’s another reason he likes his girlfriend’s car: “It’s all about how you look in this town.”

As we head down Pico Boulevard, Liam tells me about his desire to put down roots in L.A. Chris just got married, after all. “I’m sure I’ll get married one day,” he says. “But I’m only 22.” He immediately worries that his comment might become a headline about Miley—they’ve all been about her. Liam was there at her 19th-birthday party, which exploded in the tabloids after she joked about her Bob Marley cake and how she “smokes way too much fucking weed” on video. For the first time, Liam is angry. “She’s in a room full of her best friends,” he says, almost breaking a sweat. “And you have one person who comes in there and videos it. The poor girl can’t have one night where she can feel safe in her own world. It’s ridiculous.”

Read the full interview here.