‘I didn’t want to be swallowed up’: actor Josh Hartnett on swapping Hollywood for Hampshire

Every morning, as soon as the actor Josh Hartnett wakes up in his home in the Hampshire countryside, there are mouths to be fed. Most obviously, those of his four young children. But also: the dog, several guinea pigs, several more chickens and a small herd of pygmy goats. The goats, Hartnett notes, are his favourites.

“They’re the sweetest animals on the planet,” he says, over Zoom, from his home. “They’re like dogs. They would live in the house if they could. In fact, I’ve seen people having their goats in the house with diapers on, but we felt that was kinda cruel.”

Hartnett and his wife, the British actor Tamsin Egerton, spent lockdown here. For years they’d been living a ping-pong existence between the UK and the US. When their third child was on the way, they decided to stay in Hampshire, and Hartnett has become a fixture in local village life ever since.

Unlike when he’s in New York or LA, “where people only want to talk about your career,” he says, here “nobody cares”, which is just how he likes it. He’s in the UK on a marriage visa, which means he can only be out of the country for work 180 days a year, or roughly one movie, which also suits him fine. At night, after the kids have been put to bed, he sometimes finds time to paint – his first love. But mostly, he says, this existence allows him to experience his children growing up in a way he otherwise wouldn’t.

“This is all brand new to me,” he says. “I never would have expected it. And time passes quickly. With four children, you have so much to do. In a way, less is happening. But more of the important stuff is happening. My oldest daughter is eight and a half now – that feels like it happened in the last two years to me. So I’m trying to soak up as much as possible.”

Hartnett’s Hollywood trajectory was a fairly common one. Interesting early indie roles saw his stock rise – Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty in 1998, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides a year later. Those parts catapulted him into big-time roles that required little more of him than to look lovelorn ( 40 Days and 40 Nights , where his character gives up sex for Lent), heroic ( Black Hawk Down , which was thrilling but thin), or heroic and lovelorn at the same time (the deeply terrible Pearl Harbor ).

But Hartnett didn’t much like the attention that came with the big gigs. And before long he did the most unforgivable thing any would-be megastar could: he decided he didn’t want to be one. He left LA, moved back to his home state of Minnesota and parted company with his agents. Tabloids still bring up Hartnett’s disappearance – “What happened to Josh Hartnett?” Screen Rant asked recently – though it’s been almost two decades since he made the switch.

In reality, Hartnett only stopped working for 18 months. But from then on he declined the bland heart-throb roles for which he was often suggested and instead pushed for more challenging, smaller projects. (He notably turned down the role of Superman twice.) “I just didn’t want my life to be swallowed up by my work,” he says now. “And there was a notion at that time you just kind of give it all up. And you saw what happened to some people back then. They got obliterated by it. I didn’t want that for myself.”

Hartnett is 46 now and, in the past few years, his career has shifted. For a while he took on interesting parts that didn’t always come off. Films like Mozart and the Whale (2005), a love story about two people with Asperger’s, or Resurrecting the Champ (2007), about a journalist who discovers a former heavyweight boxer living on the streets, or even The Black Dahlia (2006), a highly anticipated James Ellroy adaptation. “Some of those films were successful. Some of them were failures. But I was always swinging for something that was outside what people expected from me.”

But recent projects have come good. Last year alone saw him steal the show with a gloriously funny turn as a clueless Hollywood actor in an otherwise so-so Guy Ritchie film ( Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre ), followed by an astronaut in a metaphysical love triangle in a standout episode of Black Mirror (“Beyond the Sea”), followed by a key role as a nuclear physicist in the Oscar-sweeping smash Oppenheimer . We’re a hair’s breadth away from someone calling it the “Joshonaissance”.

Next up is Trap from M Night Shyamalan, the director of every film with a twist ending you’ve ever watched ( The Sixth Sense , Signs , The Village , Old, etc). It sees Hartnett as a doting father who takes his daughter to a pop concert. The twist, which takes within the trailer: he’s also a serial killer known as “The Butcher”. The entire concert is a trap laid on to catch him. A turbo-charged cat-and-mouse caper, the pitch was “ Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert”.

In casting Hartnett, Shyamalan spoke about how hard it is to find an actor like him. No sooner have movie stars become movie stars by landing the starring role that works for them, he said, they “start to think about how they protect it”. Before long, they start only playing real-life people or settling into franchises. “And so to find somebody that’s a bona fide movie star, that’s a great human being and is willing to risk everything, man, that’s a rare combination. And sometimes you think that doesn’t exist any more. And then he walked in.”

Which does beg the question: why the purple patch now? Hartnett, after all, left the safe roles behind back when Bush was president.

It could, reckons Hartnett, be as simple as “the rest of the industry sort of catching up with what I was always hoping to do”. But also, he says, “maybe it’s also because of my age. I could name a million examples of actors who have become more interesting as they get older. You can’t be an ingenue forever, right?”

Harnett first met Shyamalan at the premiere of The Village in 2004, where they went for dinner afterwards and nerded out over film. He’d always wanted to work with him precisely because of how different all his projects were. “He’s got this reputation as being the sort of king of twists. But I have always looked at him in a different way personally – he’s someone who takes on lots of different genres and just enters those genres from a different perspective.”

He’s also another director Hartnett has had to wait for. When he got the call for Oppenheimer from Christopher Nolan, it came some 20 years after they’d spoken about The Dark Knight , which Nolan was working on at the time. Hartnett wasn’t much interested in playing Batman, and pitched himself instead for a role in another Nolan film, about rival stage magicians, called The Prestige . The role eventually went to Christian Bale, who Nolan had cast as Batman.

It was something of a relief, then, to get the Oppenheimer call all those years later.

“We didn’t have a direct conversation about it,” he says when I asked if Nolan referred to their earlier chat. “But the implication was: ‘I’d better take it.’ You only get so many opportunities with Chris Nolan.”

He doesn’t regret, he says, not pursing superhero roles. But he does allow: “I recognise the missed opportunity to work with a guy like Chris. And I’ve figured out that as much as you’re worried about curating your career to things you’re interested in, I don’t believe that’s the most important thing any more. It’s about finding people who you really trust.”

Hartnett grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father was a musician, his mother “the girl that likes to go see bands”. He describes them as hippies. They were living in a “shared living situation with other couples and single people” when his mother became pregnant.

I ask if it was it a commune?

“I’m not going to say it was a commune,” he laughs. “It was not a commune. But yes, the way they describe it, it does sound like a commune …”

His father got “a real job” – as a building manager – and bought a house, but his parents soon split up. His mother moved to San Francisco. By the time he was four, his father had married his stepmother, and “it became a much more normal Midwestern existence”.

He was, by the sounds of it, a curious mix. A natural worrier (“My family says I was an existentialist from the age of 12”) and lover of the arts, but also a jock who played on the school football team. “I played a lot of sports, because that’s what you did in the Midwest.” He got his love of painting from his stepmother, an artist, and for the longest time wanted to be an artist himself. He got his love of movies later, in his teens, when working in a video store called Mr Movies. Each night he took armfuls home, becoming obsessed with the French New Wave, and Italian directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Federico Fellini.

“This is Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the mid-90s. There wasn’t a lot of foreign film or classics you could rent in Blockbuster. But there was in Mr Movies.”

When I ask if he’s still in touch with his mother, he pauses for a second, and says: “No, she died last year.” It was a difficult relationship. “We had spent most of my youth not around each other. And she had issues with drugs and alcohol.” She had gone to rehab, then developed dementia.

I tell him my father died recently, too – a grief I feel I’m still processing many months on.

“Yeah,” he says after a second or two. “I think… my process of feeling like I had to mourn that relationship, or grieve that grief, I think that started a long time ago. And maybe because I didn’t see her as much as you’d have seen your father, because, you know, she wasn’t around…”

It was his father who had the much bigger impact on his life and, listening to Hartnett talk about him, it’s hard not to draw a through-line from his father’s priorities to his own. The idea, simply, that work isn’t everything; that your family comes first.

“My dad was not someone who valued achievement in that way – high-level work achievement as a means of proving himself. He owned a company. He allowed himself and his employees to work four days a week. And he was home a lot.” He was, he says, “an incredibly responsible human being.”

Over the course of conversation, Hartnett had mentioned the various reasons he’d stepped away from a certain kind of megawatt fame, of which this is clearly one. But I ask him now if there was a point – a moment – he can trace it back to.

He says it wasn’t so simple, no clear line between “happy Josh and unhappy Josh”, but then says: “People’s attention to me at the time was borderline unhealthy.”

Whose attention?

“Well, look, I don’t want to give this a lot of weight,” he begins. By which he means: what he’s about to say is a reason, not to be confused with the reason. “There were incidents. People showed up at my house. People that were stalking me.” At one point, he says, “a guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison.” Harnett was 27 at the time – this was 19 years ago. “There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.”

We talk, briefly, about politics. When we meet, it’s a few days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and a few weeks after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Hartnett campaigned for Obama, and has met Biden a couple of times. “He had a wonderful grasp of the issues and was incredibly eloquent, but I don’t know where we’re at these days. That debate was frightening.”

Mostly, thinking of the Trump shooting, he’s fearful of where the US is heading. And not just for us – but what we leave for those after us. “We’re in a transitional moment. The rhetoric is so hot. It’s tragic. And you have fears that the democracy might not be able to withstand those shocks. As you and I experienced recently, life goes quickly. We’re the next generation to go. Do we want to spend all that time fighting each other?”

We end on something substantially lighter – Hartnett’s rather unexpected cameo turn in the latest season of The Bear , recently nominated for a record 23 Emmys. It’s another role, like Trap , in which he plays a dad, or rather a stepfather – though one, presumably, rather less murderous.

It was also another role, he says, that was years in the making, the universe once again circling back around. He’d spoken to co-creator Christopher Storer some time before about making a film that never got off the ground. He remembers Storer mentioned at the time another project he was working on, based on his sister, a chef, and people he knew in Chicago. When Hartnett eventually got the call for season three, he didn’t hesitate. It was, after all, his new rule: work with people you trust.

“And I’ve never been on a set like it,” he says now. “All the actors show up even when they’re not working. They just love being there. It’s like a clubhouse. It shouldn’t be allowed to be called work. It’s too much fun.”

It was also a role that didn’t take long to shoot – a fraction of his 180-day allowance – then back to the Hampshire countryside and his wife, his four young children, his dog, his chickens, his guinea pigs, and several, diaper-free, pygmy goats.

Trap is in cinemas in the UK on 9 August

Fashion editor Helen Seamons; photographer’s assistant Scott Hobson-Jones; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; grooming by Charley McEwen at The Only Agency using 111Skin; location airspacelocations.co.uk

• This article was amended on 28 July 2024. An earlier version referred to John Hartnett’s “hometown” of Minneapolis rather than home state.