In his early twenties, Josh Hartnett was positioned as the industry’s next big thing. Directors said it; other actors said it; this very magazine said it. (More on that in a bit.) But the actor opted out of the machine, turning down blockbuster offers to play Batman and Superman. He veered so far left that, according to a new interview Hartnett gave to the Guardian, studios completely soured on him.
“They looked at me as someone who had bitten the hand that fed me,” Hartnett told the outlet. “It wasn’t that. I wasn’t doing it to be recalcitrant or a rebel. People wanted to create a brand around me that was going to be accessible and well-liked, but I didn’t respond to the idea of playing the same character over and over, so I branched out. I tried to find smaller films I could be part of and, in the process, I burned my bridges at the studios because I wasn’t participating. Our goals weren’t the same.”
Hartnett’s breakout arrived courtesy of Sofia Coppola’s 1999 drama The Virgin Suicides, in which he played a beautiful, brooding bad boy. Soon after came Michael Bay’s big budget vehicle Pearl Harbor—a role that, Hartnett reveals, he almost turned down. At the time, he was content with his level of success and didn’t want to step into a project that was going to thrust him so squarely in the spotlight.
“I didn’t necessarily want things to change that much,” Hartnett told the Guardian. “I was happy with the amount of fame I had and the types of roles I was getting. At the same time, I asked myself: ‘Am I just afraid that by doing Pearl Harbor, I’m going to enter a new category of film-making that I might not be ready for?’”
“I ultimately chose to do it because turning it down would’ve been based on fear,” he continued. “Then it defined me, which means I was right to fear it.”
The actor seems pretty sanguine about it all now, reflecting on the trappings of his success at the time—including a VF profile that included Pearl Harbor star Ben Affleck assessing that Hartnett “will get very famous very quickly and runs the very real risk of becoming a sort of one-man embodiment of the Backstreet Boys to hormone-crazed 15-year-old girls from Minnetonka to Tarzana.” Ah, memories!
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