Josh Hartnett has reflected on being viewed as a 'piece of meat' during his days as every teen girl's dream boyfriend. Sitting down exclusively with Metro, the 48-year-old chuckles uncomfortably when the word 'heartthrob' inevitably comes up. It is, after all, a description Hartnett has spent much of his career alternately resisting and making peace with.
From heartthrob to collaborator
'I've kind of grown up and people are trusting me with more intricate characters,' he tells us of how Hollywood sees him now. 'Directors are looking at me more as a collaborator than as just a piece of I don't what,' he laughs, 'A piece of meat on the screen, I guess.'
'I feel like I just have more space to explore the work as an artist.'
One of the defining leading men of the early 2000s, roles in Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down and 40 Days and 40 Nights turned his boyish good looks into an industry unto themselves. Somehow, those looks have matured unfairly well in the intervening years, something audiences have certainly noticed during his recent career resurgence, even as Hartnett seems more interested than ever in what he can do on screen than how he looks doing it.
He is direct and articulate, speaking less like a movie star reflecting on his fame than an actor who has thought carefully about the choices that shaped him as an artist, including his famous decision to step away from the Hollywood machine when it threatened to define him.
A new phase of his career
Now, he appears to be entering perhaps the most interesting phase of his career. After his acclaimed turn in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and playing a serial killer hiding in plain sight in M Night Shyamalan's Trap, Hartnett is back in leading-man territory opposite Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in the seriously steamy – and deeply twisted – Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity.
On paper, the material could easily tip into melodrama. In Hartnett's hands, it doesn't. As grieving husband Jeremy Crawford, he gives a surprisingly restrained, lived-in performance, finding something complicated underneath moments that could have been played with soap opera intensity. Even opposite two formidable co-stars in Hathaway and Johnson, Hartnett may well emerge as the film's most nuanced and believable presence.
It raises an intriguing question about what this stage of his career could look like if Hollywood continues giving him the sort of complicated leading roles once reserved for actors who were allowed to age out of being heartthrobs and simply become great actors.
Hartnett himself seems to feel the shift, though he was quick to correct the idea that he simply disappeared from Hollywood between his first burst of blockbuster fame and his recent resurgence.
No break from acting
'I didn't exactly take a break from acting,' he said, noting that he continued making smaller films, some of which he produced, while also raising his four children. 'They weren't big films, so less time in the theatres, I think, than I would have liked, but I also had four kids, so a lot of my time was kind of taken up in that.'
At the beginning of his career, Hartnett was heavily marketed as a heartthrob, something he now admits was both an opportunity and a potential obstacle. 'I was incredibly grateful to be allowed to be in films, but I wanted to explore lots of different parts or aspects of what I considered to be interesting characters,' he said.
Hartnett was more interested in great filmmakers than movie stars growing up, and believed he needed to demonstrate he could transform himself if he wanted to work with the directors he admired. 'I felt like if I wanted to work with the best directors, I needed to kind of be an actor that could play a lot of different types of roles. They needed to be able to trust me,' he explained.
'I felt like, yes, the heartthrob thing was going to limit my access to those great filmmakers, but it was also a way in, and it worked. I was incredibly lucky to get the first few jobs that I got right off the bat.'
Behind the scenes of Verity
His latest film offers an interesting collision between those two sides of his career. Directed by Michael Showalter, Verity follows struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Johnson), who is hired by Jeremy Crawford (Hartnett) to finish a series of novels by his wife, bestselling author Verity Crawford (Hathaway), after she is left paralysed following a car accident. Once inside the couple's home, Lowen discovers a disturbing manuscript Verity apparently never intended anyone to read – while simultaneously growing increasingly attracted to her husband.
And the resulting relationship between Lowen and Jeremy meant Hartnett, who had never met Johnson before making the movie, got to know his co-star rather quickly. 'Dakota and I didn't know each other at all,' he revealed.
Despite the decidedly erotic material, Hartnett said Showalter – who comes from a comedy background – kept the atmosphere on set surprisingly light. 'We just became friends, and we had to kind of laugh it off because it's a goofy situation. It's not very normal,' he said of filming the sex scenes.
Things became particularly surreal when the actors' real-life partners happened to visit. 'There were days when people's significant others would come in to set while we were doing that sort of stuff,' Hartnett laughed. 'We're like, "Yeah, sorry, this is our job, this is our day job."'
Fortunately, he reckons the awkwardness paid off. 'It comes across really well in the film, and it feels like all that – I don't know – that sexiness is still there.'
Hartnett's own wife, actress Tamsin Egerton, and one of his daughters also visited the set, although that resulted in a rather more wholesome encounter. His daughter is a huge Hathaway fan, and despite an especially busy day of filming, Hartnett said his co-star stopped to properly speak to her. 'She took the time to really talk to her and get to know what was going on in her life, and that's a rare thing,' he recalled. 'She's surprising in that she lives up to all expectations.'
Artistic risks and audience expectations
Verity also represents something of a gamble for Hartnett, who described taking 'artistic risks' as a guiding principle throughout his career. In fact, that attitude once helped get him kicked out of college after he wrote a letter arguing students should be allowed to take greater artistic risks – instead of actually completing the work he had been assigned.
'I haven't done anything in, I guess, a studio film like this where I'm exposing myself as, like, a male lead in this sort of way in a long time,' he said. 'I've been playing more characters that are kind of off the beaten track, and I'm happy that I'm able to come in and do this. And I hope audiences accept me doing it.'
His return to leading-man territory also gives Hartnett the chance to play with the image audiences have carried of him since his 20s. 'You're always playing with your image as an actor, I think, because there's so much attention paid to the actor behind the work,' he said. 'You're always kind of messing with an audience's expectations, no matter what you're playing.'
That is particularly useful in Verity, where deciding exactly who can be trusted is half the fun. Hartnett approached Jeremy believing that, regardless of how audiences interpret his behaviour, the character thinks he is doing the right thing: 'It's up for debate,' he said. 'It's a Rorschach test for the audience.'
And while Johnson has previously teased that Hartnett had some 'crazy theories' about what really happened, it turns out he went straight to Hoover for answers. 'I talked to Colleen about it,' he said, of his close collaboration with the author of the original book. 'So if my ideas are crazy, Colleen's ideas are crazy.' As for what the author actually told him, he's keeping that one to himself. 'I don't want to give it away because I feel like it's more fun for people if they just decide for themselves.'
Verity is released in cinemas on October 2.
