Josh Hartnett, the quiet comeback of the American heartthrob who turned his back on Hollywood

You won’t find Josh Hartnett in trendy restaurants or parties or on the red carpets. If you are in Hollywood and hoping to spot the actor in the typical places stars hang out, you will be disappointed. The 45-year-old actor from Saint Paul has not been in Hollywood for a long time. He lives quietly — with his three children and his wife, actress Tamsin Egerton — in a small town in Surrey, in the English countryside. The actor lives close to his in-laws, who give the family a hand with the children, and is just a train ride away from London, which is how he usually travels. He is far away from the tinsel of Hollywood, which is just what he wanted. He never left the movie business, but he did escape the media circus which, at the beginning of his career, a quarter of a century ago, he seemed doomed to be a part of. Until he said enough is enough. But he is happy to come back when it suits him. And now is precisely one of those moments.

Hartnett did not retire. If you review his career, beyond a break during the pandemic, he has been active almost since the same day he set foot in Los Angeles, back in 1998. When Hartnett saw his promising career as a sports star ruined in college due to a twisted ligament, theater was his Plan B. But it turns out that he loved playing Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and when he went to New York University to study art, he continued to star in small plays... until he was spotted by an agent who took him to California, where he began to work non-stop.

In his very first movie, Halloween: H20, he was Jamie Lee Curtis’ son and even appeared on the poster. His second film was the teen horror hit The Faculty, and he turned 20 on the set of his third, The Virgin Suicides. The director, Sofia Coppola, gave him a bottle of wine, with the message: “Congratulations, you’re not a teen heartthrob anymore.” He couldn’t drink it, he wasn’t of legal age.

That film set a standard for Hartnett’s work. First, because he learned to thoroughly prepare for his roles. He said in interviews that at that time, he was a kid, not an actor, and that he had to get his act together. He talked to the authors of the books on which the films were based (in this case, with Jeffrey Eugenides); he met the protagonists, if they were real; he trained, ate, did what they did. But looking back, he recognized that he was very young when he starred in Coppola’s movie. “I was a child. I was 19,” he told The Guardian in 2020. “The Virgin Suicides felt like a group of friends all pulling together. I think I’m still looking for that experience whenever I make a film.”

But he wasn’t very pleased with the fame that followed. “I studied art in NY, painting. I was not the most popular kid in school. And suddenly I had people chasing me down the street,” he told Variety in June. The situation intensified after the 2001 blockbuster Pearl Harbor, which grossed $450 million worldwide. Hartnett confessed that he had doubted taking on the role, and in hindsight, was perhaps not prepared for such a big movie. “I ultimately chose to do it because turning it down would’ve been based on fear. Then it defined me, which means I was right to fear it,” he told The Guardian.

In 2001, Black Hawk: Down also came out. And Harnett didn’t stop there. He followed it up with 40 Days and 40 Nights in 2002, Hollywood Homicide, alongside Harrison Ford in 2003, Sin City in 2005, Lucky Number Slevin and the acclaimed movie The Black Dahlia in 2006... For a decade, Josh Hartnett’s face was everywhere, both on billboards and in the school folders of teenage girls.

Hartnett was as famous as Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were at that time. And right when he was at his peak, he disappeared. He has never stopped acting. He has released a film almost every year — taking a break between 2011 and 2014 to star in the TV series Penny Dreadful — but always in small projects, not Hollywood blockbusters.

Hartnett was offered the part of Superman. He would have been paid $100 million, but he wasn’t interested in the role. He was also offered the part of Batman, but he only wanted to meet the movie’s director, a then largely unknown Christopher Nolan. They had only one meeting; in the end, Christian Bale was chosen. In any case, Hartnett had bowed out of the race. “I decided to have a life. To put that first. That was always my goal,” he confessed in an interview with the magazine Mr. Porter in January 2021. “I started to realize that I had to perform in a certain way in the marketplace or I was going to lose my career. And I had never really thought of it as a career up until that point. I was basically very naïve.” He didn’t mean to burn bridges or be the rebel of the season, much less define his image that way. But that’s what happened.

While Hartnett’s attitude may sound naïve, even false, time has shown that it was not a strategy. “The guys who are on top are terrified that someone’s coming up behind them. If that’s your real ambition, to be on top all the time, you’re going to spend your whole life looking over your shoulder. I never wanted that. I want to do good work with people I like and spend my free time with people I care about,” he told Mr. Porter.

“A lot of people will find the most expeditious way to get from A to B. If that means losing a little bit of baggage, meaning your friends or your connection to your home, so be it. It’s going to be much easier if you just socialize with people who are in the industry, because they’re going to hire you for the next job,” he continued. “A lot of people get caught in that trap, but I feel very strongly about friends I’ve known for a long time and my family. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing those relationships. Those people make me who I am. I put those concerns ahead of chasing a Hollywood dream.”

This approach worked for him. He had a broad enough foundation to sustain a career outside the big studio system, which he never felt comfortable with. What’s more, he avoided being typecast and didn’t have to turn himself into a brand. Hartnett has accepted the roles that he wanted, when he wanted them.

His big break came last year, when he starred in an episode of the series Black Mirror, and had a small role in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, the movie of the year, which was nominated for seven Oscars (Hartnett’s appearance at the award ceremony was his first in more than a decade). Speaking to the British newspaper The Independent, ahead of the release of Oppenheimer — where he plays physicist Ernest Lawrence — Hartnett confessed that he was no good at promoting movies. “Promoting a movie? There’s not going to be one person who says I’m great at that part. I’m not very good at creating an image,” he said, admitting that he is uncomfortable with fame. “Being famous is a full-time job, because every time you leave your house — and especially in that time — you were followed,” he added, remembering how both fans and paparazzi constantly followed him, and he struggled to act like himself. Hartnett said that he never found the work-life balance that other actors were able to find.

After a season in his native Saint Paul (which drove his agents crazy), he settled in London with his family. He does occasionally leave his hideaway. In fact, he will have to do it this year, because he is the star of one of the hottest movies of the year: Trap, by horror master M. Night Shyamalan, which will be released in August. Back in 2005, he declared to EL PAÍS that “big productions were a path to unhappiness.” He has not changed his mind, and it seems like the path he has chosen to heading towards a happiness that was unthinkable two decades ago.

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