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.

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