Some would say that winning the Academy Award at 20 would be the pivotal event of your life. Not for Timothy Hutton. The star of such projects as “The Falcon and the Snowman,” “Taps,” “The Nero Wolfe” episodes and the upcoming TNT series “Leverage” remembers a bigger sea change when he was 12.

“We were living in the East and my mother got a teaching job in the Bay Area, and we moved to Berkeley. I was in the sixth grade and about to be in the seventh grade, so it was junior high school. I had been the kid that kind of kept to myself,” he says, seated on a green-and-gold armchair in a Beverly Hills hotel room, the sun backlighting his dark hair.

“That move at that time, when I’d established friends, was a big move and really changed me and exposed me to all kinds of wonderful and amazing things. Berkeley in 1972 in terms of music …” he says with a sigh.

Though he was the son of actor Jim Hutton, Tim was never the outgoing type. “Acting wasn’t anything I was at all interested in doing. In high school I was asked to audition for a play or two and got a part. Then they asked me to another one, and I never really understood it. I didn’t understand what they saw.

“I wasn’t this extroverted kid. I was on the basketball team, the baseball team, things like that,” Hutton says. “I was kinda shy. I was interested in building, being an architect maybe. I was interested in writing. I had an appreciation for things visual. I was into photography. But acting? Getting up and speaking, being in front of people? No, not at all.”

That attitude persisted right up to the time Robert Redford was looking for a winsome young man for “Ordinary People.”

“They asked me to come back and audition again. I thought, ‘They’ll find someone good at this. I must look like the drawing on the cover of Judith Guest’s book. That’s the only reason they keep calling me back.’”

Once he got past that doubt, he began to adjust. “There were points when I was making ‘Ordinary People’ where I would have a particularly satisfying day, where I was pushed or I pushed myself to really go someplace that I didn’t think possible. At the end of the day like that you’re left exhausted but deeply satisfied that you were part of telling a story. And those were the days that … made me excited.”

When he earned the coveted Oscar for his fledgling role, he dedicated it to his father, who’d died two years earlier.

Hutton, 48, has augmented his acting with directing. Since he was a youngster he’s harbored an entrepreneurial streak. In school, he and a friend ran a car-washing and maintenance business. He toiled at an ice cream shop washing dishes in the basement. “My mother was working on a teacher’s salary, and we didn’t have any allowance,” he explains.

In his latest role in “Leverage,” he’s promoted to the master entrepreneur. He plays the chief of a gang of savvy con men who dedicate their prodigious talents to evening the score with society’s low-profile bad guys. The series premieres Sunday. On Dec. 9, it slides into its regular slot at 10 p.m. Tuesdays.

Once he’d read the script and knew Dean Devlin was directing, Hutton was in. But accepting parts is a cautionary game for him. He’s married to French illustrator and designer Aurore Giscard d’Estaing. They have an 8-year-old son, Milo. During Milo’s school year they live in Paris. The rest of the year they stay mostly at their country home in New York.

Hutton’s older son, Noah, with actress Debra Winger, will graduate this spring. And Hutton is determined to be there.

“The hardest part is just carving out time for yourself to just be with your family,” he says. “There are certain things I won’t miss, no matter what.”