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WHEN JOSH HARTNETT walks down the hall, you can hear him coming. That’s not because he’s yapping up a storm, and no, he doesn’t have some particularly noisy piece of clothing on. You hear Josh Hartnett coming because when he walks down the hall, he demands attention. People see him coming. People introduce themselves. And he responds, jovially. Hartnett has a magnetic way about him that you don’t see often these days: a glow, an aura, a very specific kind of charm. There’s a soft smile on his face, but an energy pulsing from behind his eyes. It’s the kind of charm felt in any room, capable of being caught on any camera. An energy that even the biggest philistine you know could probably detect. That’s right: He feels like a goddamn movie star.
In the last year and change, he’s appeared in both Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (as the intelligent and pragmatic scientist Ernest Lawrence) and an excellent episode of Black Mirror (as a father balancing time between space and Earth), and just last month he made a surprise appearance in season 3 of The Bear (as Frank, the new fiancé of fan-favorite Richie’s ex-wife). Now he’s on the cusp of leading Trap, a brand-new M. Night Shyamalan-directed horror film with a trailer that’s already riled audiences up; the movie seems poised to make noise both with critics and at the box office. We’re thundering into an era that can only be described as a Hartnettissance.
Hartnett with Ebon Moss-Bachrach in season 3 of The Bear.
But someone doesn’t earn the right to an “-issance” era if they haven’t had that type of moment before. And Hartnett sure has, bursting onto the scene in the late ’90s with a series of high-profile roles in horror (Halloween H20 and The Faculty), drama (Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor), coming-of-age classics (The Virgin Suicides), and even romantic comedy (40 Days and 40 Nights). Hartnett was barely into his 20s during this time, and a unique blend of talent, charisma, and good looks helped shoot him to the top of directors’ wish lists and into resident Hollywood heartthrob status.
“I hope I’ve learned a lot since then,” Hartnett says. He’s comfortably seated in the Men’s Health offices in midtown Manhattan, wearing a denim shirt with the top button undone, revealing a thin necklace around his neck. “It was all just brand-new, very shiny, and very interesting. I look back on it all fondly, but I also see someone just trying to figure it out.”
Watching his recent output and hearing him discuss how he balances important work with a burgeoning family life, it becomes clear that he’s managed to do just that—figure it out. While his presence onscreen was always charged and exciting, his experience in the past couple of decades helped him find a place where he knows exactly what to do and how to do it; his choices have been spot-on, and his performances even better.
This all leads to Trap, a movie that combines Hartnett’s tools into one stylish package: It’s built around his charm, but it reconciles that with the fact that his main character is a heinous killer. It’s made by an auteur director with a singular vision in what’s historically been his genre of choice, and from what it seems like, everyone is ready to go full steam ahead into a new age of Hartnett.
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN remembers the first time he met Hartnett. It was at the New York City premiere of Shyamalan’s film The Village, just about 20 years ago, and the director has found a black-and-white photo from that night, of the exact moment. Beaming, he flashes it to the Zoom camera as we chat.
“I remember his energy—it’s different from the Josh I know now,” Shyamalan says. “He was a kind of observer young man, who was taking in all the stimuli, almost detached a little bit, but had a sweet energy about him.”
Hartnett also remembers the night vividly, one that started with him joining a friend (who was in The Village) at the premiere and ended with him having dinner with one of his directing heroes. What he didn’t realize at the time, though, was what the next 20 years would be filled with—and how their paths would eventually cross again.
Now 46, Hartnett has spent the better part of the last decade based in London, where he lives with his wife, actress Tamsin Egerton, and their four children. Perhaps it’s living away from the industry epicenters of New York and Los Angeles that’s helped him figure out the latest level of his movie star persona—because that’s certainly part of what caught Shyamalan’s attention.
The director has always based his life and work in Philadelphia, and, in Hartnett’s uprooting to London, he saw a bit of himself. When it came time to cast a character who’s both a serial killer (!) and a loving father (!!) in Trap—a very specific role written for a very specific kind of actor—he felt lucky to have connected with Hartnett, whom he too felt had found a new gear.
Hartnett plays a father with a menacing secret in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap (2024).
Hartnett as scientist Ernest Lawrence in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023).
“I was like, gosh, this is the perfect guy, at the perfect time in his life, because he really is an old-school superstar,” Shyamalan says. “Really, like, Mel [Gibson] and Bruce [Willis] and all of those guys I’ve worked with—he’s like that!”
Shyamalan admires Hartnett’s gift for both humor and instantly bringing a natural realism to any project. Some actors we just watch and admire, he says, but others, the superstars, invite audiences into their world. “That’s something the human being doesn’t even decide,” the director continues. “Whether it’s Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts, they have decided in themselves to let you in.”
But, Shyamalan continues, Hartnett belongs in a different group.
“I think we’re talking about it—the Robert Downey Jr.’s, the Bryan Cranstons, the Anthony Hopkins—the group that reinvented themselves,” he says. “They found themselves as human beings in a journey separate from the movies and then brought that strength back to their character. And we can feel it as they’re exploding onscreen and letting us see their empathy and confidence in the portrayal of these characters. Life brought them to a complex and beautiful point of view, and we feel it as the audience member. My God, you know? They’re coming from this really special place, and Josh is coming from that place.”
Hartnett was doing the red-carpet rounds for Oppenheimer when he had a Zoom meeting with Shyamalan to discuss the lead role in his new film. They talked about the movie, dove into the character, and hit it off. They later met up in Dublin—Hartnett flew over from London—where the director was producing his daughter Ishana’s directorial debut, The Watchers. Things were progressing… but then the SAG-AFTRA strike hit. And they couldn’t really talk for a while. But while separate, both star and director read books on the subject, considered the character and their conversations, and Shyamalan tinkered with the script. By the time they returned, poststrike, they were very aligned and very much on the same page.
“Usually you don’t get so much time to explore the character in depth with the director beforehand, unless you’re producing it,” Hartnett says. “But in this situation we did, just kind of by circumstance. And luckily, we both came to the same conclusions on our own.”
Shyamalan had been a fan of Hartnett’s early-career work, but it was his recent output—his work with Nolan and in Black Mirror—that really caught his eye. “My dream version of Trap is the audience comes, and you reveal a superstar,” he says. “That’s always my dream. Reveal something to the audience. A must-see, best performance of the year. Well, how do you do that with a 40-something-year-old character? Where is someone hiding that’s a superstar? And Josh just walked in, the right guy, at the right time in his life.”
Hartnett’s career began with a pair of horror movies, and he’s always felt a connection to this kind of story. “It explores sides of human psychology that we don’t readily explore in a lot of other genres,” he says. “You don’t get to play a character like this in any other genre.”
Trap, like just about every other M. Night Shyamalan film, wants to do something you haven’t seen before. And while we’ve seen “Can they escape?” thrillers, we haven’t seen that kind of story being told from the perspective of a character who’s earned the nickname “the Butcher.” He’s someone “who you end up kind of getting to know, and hopefully getting to sort of appreciate and understand…” Harnett says before trailing off a bit. “Even though it’s really hard to understand someone like that.”
He continues, thinking more about the film he’s made and how he wants to present a character who would seem to be antiheroic at best and perhaps pure evil at worst. “The character has that very human element, that very normal instinct of father protecting daughter,” he says. “But clearly he doesn’t interact with the other people in the world in the same way that a normal person would. It’s that connection that was really cool and unusual, and I haven’t seen any other characters like that in this genre before.”
SHYAMALAN’S FILMS HAVE long been vehicles for breakout performances; present-day stars like Dave Bautista, James McAvoy, and Samuel L. Jackson have all done some of their best work under his guidance, and Hartnett seems poised to be the next to join that impressive list. Just as in his star-making run in the late ’90s and early 2000s, things are going his direction. But for a while, that wasn’t necessarily the case.
A quieter period over the last decade found the actor drifting into smaller-budget, more independent-minded films, away from the studio tentpoles that many had gotten to know him in. This stage found him working on some hidden gems. (A personal favorite of his is 2008’s August, a 2001-set film in which he and Adam Scott starred as a pair of struggling Internet start-up founders in the time just before 9/11, which he mentions along with the cult thriller Lucky Number Slevin.) Other projects, however, didn’t quite receive the reception he’d hoped for.
His star unquestionably dimmed, but it wasn’t due to lack of ambition, lack of work, or lack of trying. “It wasn’t like I was off somewhere, mercurially working on something that was not ever… I wanted them to be successful. They were very worthy films,” he says. “They had every chance to break through. They just, for whatever reason, didn’t.”
Tired of waiting for career-changing roles to come to him, he decided to make a change and go after the career he wanted. Hartnett mapped out exactly what he wanted to do: build a sustainable long-term career. That meant working with people he admired and respected and hunting for the best roles possible. He wanted the parts that were the best, and in the best movies, he says, not necessarily the ones that everyone else in the industry was going after.
The key, he says, was leaving his old agency and finding a new one that would help him to actively pursue those new goals. “I never wanted to chase the hottest property and be one of the guys who could have gotten it but didn’t get it, or whatever,” he says. “I don’t want to be a part of that game.”
Instead, he had his new agency make some calls, one of which went to Guy Ritchie, who was working on a Jason Statham-led crime film called Wrath of Man. There wasn’t a part in the script for Hartnett, but the two wanted to work together—so the director invited him to come join the project, and they wrote in a role for him as they went along. “As soon as people see that you’re working in movies that are getting more attention, you become more viable,” he says.
Hartnett would make another film with Ritchie, the 2023 comedic adventure Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (which also starred Statham), before getting the call from Christopher Nolan to be a part of Oppenheimer. Nolan and Hartnett had been linked in the past, as the former was rumored to have offered Hartnett the leading role in his Batman series—something the actor now quickly shoots down. “I wasn’t offered Batman,” he says, clearly running through memories of conversations past and flickering his eyes in frustration. “Let’s just leave that.”
But for all the phases Hartnett has had in his career, he’s also never been the play-it-safe golden boy you might remember. Even in his early roles—in the twisted horror of The Faculty and Halloween: H20; the brutal, realistic war violence of Black Hawk Down; the dark subject matter of The Virgin Suicides (and his womanizing teenage hunk character); and even the unsettling twists in the updated Shakespeare of O—he takes serious risks where most ascending leading men would not have. His romantic comedy effort, 40 Days and 40 Nights, was cruder and lewder than most of its peers; those sorts of movies were common in the early 2000s, but A-list leading men starring in them was not.
“It’s probably just a reflection of who I am,” he says. “I’m annoyed by people that play the numbers and game the system and just do the safe thing. Generally, I find that kind of bullshit. I’ve always wanted to try to do things that are a little bit more off-center.”
EVER SINCE HE began finding parts that really reflected what he wanted to be doing, Hartnett’s onscreen roles and real life have been on a collision course. Just a few days before we met in New York, he was with two of his daughters at one of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour shows in London; the entirety of Trap takes place at a massive concert by “Lady Raven,” an obvious homage to many contemporary pop stars, played by Shyamalan’s own daughter Saleka. Hartnett’s character is along for the ride, accompanying his daughter to the show… and he also happens to be a sadistic serial killer who discovers that the entire event is actually an elaborate ruse designed to capture him. He similarly plays a loving dad who develops a murderous air about him in “Beyond the Sea,” his starring turn in season 6 of Black Mirror.
His career is once again taking off, but in roles that are fairly consistently dark across the board. There’s humor in Trap, and Black Mirror is a heightened sci-fi show. But still, there needs to be a way for someone immersed in these worlds to let go, right?
The answer, he says, is just accepting that, as a dad, he’s got things he needs to do. His home life takes priority; there’s no time for actor bullshit. “Now that I have a family, when I go home at the end of the day, they don’t allow me the time to be self-indulgent and worry about what I did that day as a character, or stay in that mode,” he says. “There are things I have to do—kids are demanding and they need your time.”
Hartnett describes one particular Black Mirror scene—and if you’ve seen his episode, you know the one—as “just awful” and “really hard to let go of afterward,” but as he’s gotten older and more experienced, he’s learned that sometimes you just need to leave things behind. No tricks, no secrets; just letting it go. Leisure activities can help with that. He and the family have a little farm at their home now, including four pygmy goats (named Poppy, Grape, Lavender, and… well, he’s jet-lagged and will remember the fourth name later) that he describes as “the funniest animals on the planet.”
Hartnett as Trip Fontaine in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999).
Hartnett as SSG Matt Eversmann in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001).
All of this comes back to what Hartnett sees as the right way to balance his career and his life. Yes, he wants to do great projects, work with great people, and have fun. But what’s most important is making sure that one aspect of his life—his friends, his family—fits seamlessly with the other—his work, his projects. “Making art, generally, is very important to me. But without a good stable background of good community and good family, it doesn’t really amount to much,” he says. “You need the first for the second to work really well.”
In a way, Hartnett managed to combine work and family in his experience on Oppenheimer, where the cast members were so openly close that their nickname for themselves (the “Oppenhomies”) became public knowledge during the film’s awards-season-sweeping run. As scientist Ernest Lawrence, Hartnett played one of the most trusted colleagues of Cillian Murphy’s title character and one of the most pragmatic characters in a film filled with moral quandary.
One moment, when Hartnett’s Lawrence approaches Oppenheimer, has become a popular reaction clip online. He walks slowly, frustrated, clearly holding back as he bites his lips inward. His six-foot-three build takes up most of the frame as he moves closer, before the words erupt from his mouth like a volcano: “What are you doing?” he asks, a tiny moment that stands out even in Nolan’s three-hour epic. Hartnett’s physicality has always been a major asset in his playbook as a performer, and seeing him deploy it in the latest phase of his career is a sign of the work he could continue to do in the future.
“I thought he was so phenomenal in Oppenheimer,” Christopher Storer says. Storer, the creator of The Bear, who almost made a film with Hartnett a decade ago before casting him in a surprise role in season 3 of his show, has always been impressed with his physicality and “a gentleness” that he feels comes naturally. “Seeing him transition almost into a role [Kevin] Costner would’ve played, which is, like, the hyper-intelligent authority. And watching him grow.”
Hartnett relished the opportunity to work with Nolan. But it’s still the viral, unpredictable sensation of “Barbenheimer” that gets the actor, naturally, thinking out loud.
“Nobody could have predicted Barbenheimer,” he says. “That’s the phenomenon that was so out of left field, and I think both films were a little bit stunned by that.”
But did he see Barbie?
Of course.
Did he love it?
It was great. I mean, did those two films go together? I guess, but that’s the weirdest combination of all time.
Well, maybe that’s why it worked.
I guess. But I mean, try to re-create that. You’re not going to be able to.
Just like his character in Oppenheimer, that dry realism is something that Hartnett greatly values. He’s not trying to predict trends or match industry miracles. He’s been through the film wringer, working in just about every genre, feeling the highest of highs and, presumably, the lowest of lows when something just isn’t connecting. And so even with his recent success, Hartnett isn’t chasing the things that many newly ascending stars might; he’s not interested in franchises, or fame, or fortune. He’s been there. He’s done that. And, right now, he’s exactly where he wants to be.
Styling by Dolly Pratt, Grooming by Catherine Furniss
