Josh Hartnett: ‘People really thought I was run into them’ |...

J.osh Hartnett is sitting at home in Surrey pondering the time when he was asked to play Superman. “I got the idea that because he lives in this world where he cannot touch anything without it flying across the room, he is almost afraid of himself and his own power. He doesn’t know how to be Superman anymore. He is so scared that he is almost castrated by the experience of living on earth where he can blow things up just looking at them. “

The studio turned it down – “They didn’t really want a fear-based character at the center of their film,” he says dryly – and Hartnett walked away. But his concept of Superman now feels like a metaphor for what was happening in his own life at the time when he was increasingly overwhelmed or even appalled by his status and the hysteria that surrounded him. Twenty years ago, Leonardo DiCaprio, Will Smith, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Hartnett were the hottest young male actors in Hollywood. Michael Bay, who directed it at Pearl Harbor, put it bluntly: “He’s going to be bloody big.” The actor grimaces at the mention. “Huge was never something I wanted to achieve,” he says.

At the time he looked like a pretty child who had climbed over his head. The 42-year-old acquired the cross-eyed, questioning beauty from Richard Gere. He and his wife, British actor Tamsin Egerton, moved to Surrey with their two young children to be closer to their parents, he explains. “And then of course coronavirus …” In other words, they’re not going anywhere. So he’s got time to talk and a new movie to talk about: the fact-based thriller Target Number One, which is better than any of its torn out of the hat titles (also known as Gut Instinct and Most Wanted). might suggest.

This is partly due to the dazzling Antoine Olivier Pilon, the star of Xavier Dolan’s psychodrama Mommy. He plays a real little drug dealer who was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Thai prison after being set up by the Canadian police. Hartnett is firmly in the less conspicuous role of the journalist Victor Malarek, who struggled to bring the truth to light. In that capacity, he can perform the time-honored All the President’s Men routine of storming into his editor’s office, tossing a newspaper on the desk, and knowing where the hell his story is.

Hartnett is doing his homework. With The Virgin Suicides, playing what director Sofia Coppola had written wasn’t enough; With Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote the original novel, he also went into his character, a dreamy high school stallion. In Brian De Palma’s film noir, The Black Dahlia, Hartnett was trained as a boxer for several months simply because his character, a cop, was one. Of course, he met up with the real Malarek before playing him. Why? “I wanted to see if he was full of shit.”

Malarek, he explains, has been accused by his critics of putting himself at the forefront of his own stories. “Ultimately, Victor is a humble man, but he sees himself as someone who stands up for people in vulnerable positions. However, he likes to fit into a situation In my opinion, he really puts himself in the line of fire. In a way, he’s almost downplaying his own contribution. “Malarek said he had no idea who Hartnett was. As someone who has spent the last 15 years running from fame, he must have liked this. “I didn’t assume he knew me,” he says. “My interest in meeting him was that no flowers were placed at my feet.” So he didn’t take a signed Pearl Harbor poster with him? “I should have done. That would have been a great introduction. “Hello, I was someone once …”

Quite. Hartnett was everywhere in the late 1990s. He starred in consecutive horror hits – the aliens-in-high school frenzy The Faculty and the sequel to Halloween H20 – and resembled a shampoo commercial in The Virgin Suicides where he staggered in slow motion to the sound of Magic Man by heart .

“It’s a little heartbreaking to see all of this passing by,” he says. “I was a child. I was 19. The Virgin Suicides felt like a group of friends pulling together. I think I still look for that experience when making a movie. “

The Faculty and Halloween H20 were produced by Dimension, Miramax’s horror arm, which made Hartnett part of the Weinstein brothers’ talent stable. “I was a kid they should invest in, but I didn’t spend a lot of time with them,” he says. “We had a kind of antagonistic relationship because the contract I signed for those first two films guaranteed me to be part of about five other films. They are called contract extensions. I was told at the time that no one would ever use them, but then I guess I became popular and they decided to exercise that right. A couple of times they’ve jumped on other projects I’ve worked on and become co-producers. “These included O a modern Othello with Hartnett, impressively wrapped as an Iago character, and the comic thriller Lucky Number Slevin, in which he seemed to make fun of his own image by spending the first half hour in nothing but a hopping towel.

He moves uncomfortably when I ask if he was surprised by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein. “There are all kinds of rumors about guys like this going through the business and you think, ‘This is awful. ‘The casting couch was one thing people joked about when I first got into the industry. So it was an open secret that this business sucks a little. “

When he was offered Pearl Harbor, his instinct was to refuse. “I didn’t really want things to change that much,” he says. “I was happy with the fame and roles I got. At the same time, I asked myself, “Am I just scared that with Pearl Harbor I will be stepping into a new category of filmmaking that I may not be ready for?” I ultimately chose because it was fearful to decline. Then it defined me, which means I was right to fear it. “

It wasn’t easy for his co-stars either. Kate Beckinsale was instructed to exercise (“I just didn’t understand why a 1940s nurse would do this,” she said) while Affleck was ordered to get new teeth. “Now, you are great teeth, ”says Hartnett. “I was also asked to train. But you know I could have used it. I was 165 pounds wet. I was a really skinny kid. “

Alongside his own concerns about the project, there was increased press attention, including a zippy Vanity Fair interview with him from the set of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. “Oh, that was a horrible piece,” he shudders. “Was there even a quote from me or was everyone just talking about how hot I was? Then people got a chip on my shoulder. They really thought I was run into them. It was a very strange time. “

It was around this time that he was planning his calculated retreat. After Superman, there were reports that he had also turned down Batman; In fact, he got no closer to that part than talking to Christopher Nolan. But the perception of him in Hollywood was beginning to change. “They saw me as someone who bit the hand that was feeding me. It wasn’t. I didn’t do it to be stubborn or rebellious. People wanted to create a brand around me that would be accessible and popular, but I didn’t respond to the idea of ​​playing the same character over and over, so I branched out. I was trying to find smaller films to take part in and burned my bridges in the studios in the process for not taking part. Our goals weren’t the same. “

He’s put his films where his mouth is and worked with idiosyncratic directors like Tran Anh Hung on the thriller I Come With the Rain and Atsuko Hirayanagi on the comedy Oh, Lucy. He’s not averse to the mainstream either: he’ll next star alongside Jason Statham in Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man. But it’s a measure of how unusual it is for a star to retire so early in their career that GQ magazine called it their comeback when Hartnett was filming The Black Dahlia in 2006.

“I’m happy to be finished with this era and make films that are more personal to me,” he says. “Directors come to me to play characters as opposed to versions of a hero I once played in a movie.”

He is nothing if not conscientious. A few days after our Zoom conversation, he calls me because something bothered him: He doesn’t have the feeling that he has made his feelings towards Weinstein clear. This time, he makes it as clear as possible. “I wasn’t surprised he was a scare,” he says. “But I think I was surprised at the level of his creepiness.” He’s also concerned about what’s next. “The shameless seem to find it easy to make a comeback. Louis CK was pretty shameless. Harvey Weinstein, if he had the slightest bit of daylight there, would find a way to get back inside. These are situations that freak me out. “But there are visible changes. “Different things are expected of the way people act on set. There is now an open line of communication for anyone who feels harassed. And there’s less of the so-called locker room humor that people have been hiding behind. “

Has he ever been molested as a young actor? “The last thing I want to do is come across like … you know, I’ve been in situations where I’ve been uncomfortable with my boss’s behavior, but I’m not going to say …” He changes direction. “That is not my experience and it is not my job to say that. It makes me gross to try that. “

He also tells me that he went back to that Vanity Fair article and found that it wasn’t that bad after all. “It’s just that it happened at a time when I wasn’t that famous, and it already seemed to be asking if it should be me or not. I felt like, ‘Oh my god! I’m not the biggest poppy yet – don’t cut me off! ‘I’ve been compared to Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts and that’s crazy. It was a moment of failure. ” He sighs. “It was actually an interesting look at the nature of fame. If only it wasn’t about me. “