Josh Hartnett, the hunky younger heartthrob of “Pearl Harbor” and “Black Hawk Down,” is having fun with a exceptional renaissance after seemingly vanishing from Hollywood for twenty years.
Since final yr, he has performed a key position within the Oscar-sweeping “Oppenheimer,” guest-starred in acclaimed TV hits “The Bear” and “Black Mirror,” and is now the lead in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Trap.”
But, the 46-year-old instructed AFP forward of Friday’s launch of “Trap,” he by no means actually went away — the business is lastly providing him the “unique” roles he all the time wished.
“These directors just now find me interesting,” Hartnett stated, by way of Zoom.
“Whereas maybe a few years ago, I was, I don’t know, too young to be interesting?” he added, laughing. “Maybe I hadn’t lived enough? I don’t know what it was.”
In “Trap,” Hartnett performs Cooper, a doting father who takes his younger teen daughter to a Taylor Swift-esque pop star’s live performance.
Yet we be taught virtually instantly that Cooper is a serial killer, and your complete gig is a police sting designed to ensnare him.
“The conceit of this movie, which is so cool, is that we tell you right off the bat he’s the bad guy,” stated Hartnett. “And yet we need you to… root for him as he gets out of the situation.”
The position is the form of “high-wire act” that has appealed to him ever since Harnett, on the peak of his fame, turned down an opportunity to play Superman and abruptly left Los Angeles within the 2000s.
He returned to his house state of Minnesota, and later moved to England the place he now lives — however by no means stopped performing.
“I love a high-wire act and I also love the chance that maybe I’m going to fall flat on my face — it gets me excited,” stated Harnett. “I feel a yearning to do that sort of work.”
“Trap” is a return to the genres that made Hartnett’s title.
His first credited movie position was “Halloween H20,” the 1998 horror sequel starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Harnett rapidly starred in teen thrillers “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides.”
He then joined the Hollywood A-list, enjoying a heroic pilot reverse Ben Affleck in 2001’s “Pearl Harbor.” The World War II epic was savaged by critics, however turned a revenue regardless of an eye-watering $140 million price range.
That identical yr, Hartnett performed a particular forces soldier in “Black Hawk Down.”
But after quitting Los Angeles, sacking his agent and rejecting extra generic “hero” characters, large film roles dried up.
Articles started showing within the Hollywood press with headlines like “What happened to Josh Hartnett?”
For years, Harnett labored primarily with youthful administrators, serving to them get their films made, typically exterior the Hollywood system.
That seems to have lastly modified, particularly since Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.”
“I don’t need to help Chris Nolan make his film. But I was able to be a part of a world, and with a director that I think is one of the best working right now,” he stated.
Harnett performed Ernest Lawrence, a revered colleague of Oppenheimer’s who fell out with the good physicist over his early Communist leanings and marital infidelities.
Harnett’s position in “Trap” is decidedly much less morally respectable, regardless of Cooper’s misleading floor look as a candy, loving father.
Research that concerned studying books on the psychology of intensely “charming” psychopaths who “hide in plain sight” was fascinating if disturbing, stated the actor.
“I was always trying to do things that were outside of the box,” stated Harnett. “And now, I guess, I’m not pigeonholed and people are allowing me to play these disparate characters. And it’s great. I really feel lucky.”
© 2024 AFP