How Did Josh Hartnett Escape From His Early-2000s Leading Man ‘Trap’?

M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Trap is about a sweetly uncool dad who’s actually a terrifying serial killer who wants desperately to escape from a sting operation that’s closing in on him, all while maintaining some kind of decency toward his 12-year-old daughter. It requires a leading man, then, who can play a lot of different and seemingly contradictory notes. In the past, Shyamalan has gotten particularly good (and sometimes offbeat) performances from Bruce Willis , Samuel L. Jackson , James McAvoy , Dave Bautista , and Paul Giamatti . You would be forgiven for not immediately presuming that Josh Hartnett would be the next to join this list.

But Hartnett has been on a roll: He’s the unequivocal lead in Trap , his first such part in a major wide release in years; last year, he had a solid supporting role in the Oscar-winning megahit Oppenheimer ; and before that, he did a couple of decidedly different Jason Stathan/Guy Ritchie movies, Operation Fortune and Wrath of Man . Doing movies with Shyamalan, Christopher Nolan, and Ritchie, it’s as if Hartnett has picked up his career trajectory from the mid-2000s, back when he was flirting with A-list status.

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It’s not that simple, of course; Hartnett has been working steadily since that time, and there wasn’t one particular movie flop that got him off the leading-man track. By his own account, he turned down some big jobs and worked a little less than he could have in order to spend more time with his growing family, away from Hollywood schmoozing. At the same time, you can look at the entirety of Hartnett’s 2010s output and likely not recognize a single movie, so it’s not simply a matter of a slight downshift or reinventing himself as a character actor. His recent films are easily his most successful in terms of Hartnett playing, well, an actual adult.

Hartnett got his big-screen break in Weinstein-produced horror, playing Laurie Strode’s teenage son in the legacy sequel Halloween H20 and the rebellious Zeke in Robert Rodriguez’s Invasion of the Breakfast Clubbers riff The Faculty . Both had creative contributions from Scream guy Kevin Williamson, and both came out in 1998. H20 was the bigger hit, but The Faculty made better use of Hartnett’s low-voiced, mussed-hair, multi-shirt mystique – in perfect ’90s style, he was both a teen outlaw and a vaguely preppie parody of one. It dovetailed perfectly with his work in The Virgin Suicides , where he played the impossibly cool and realistically callow heartthrob Trip Fontaine, and O , where he plays a teenage version of Iago from Othello .

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When it came time for him to grow up on screen, however, Hartnett stumbled immediately after appearing in a couple of big Jerry Bruckheimer-level productions. Pearl Harbor ensnared him in a disaster greater than any one actor, and Black Hawk Down rendered its ensemble relatively anonymous. But it’s Hartnett’s attempts to make mainstreaming leading-man movies that feel so particularly and lifelessly rooted in the early 2000s. 40 Days and 40 Nights attempts to position him as a rom-com leading man, as a guy who – nursing a bad break-up and his own tendency to blunt his pain with casual sex – attempts to abstain from any sexual gratification during Lent. (Yes, a rare Lent-themed sex comedy.) The following year, Hartnett costarred with Harrison Ford in Hollywood Homicide , playing a cop who would rather be an actor.

Both 40 Days and 40 Nights and Hollywood Homicide are weirdly self-conscious about Hartnett’s sex appeal – which clearly was substantial at the time, but perhaps not so all-encompassing so as to require that he play guys with an almost supernaturally awesome power over the opposite sex. It’s that quality that turns 40 Days into a deeply Abercrombie-ish romance, even as Hartnett’s character attempts to brush off the endless supply of come-hither Axe Body Spray-level propositions in favor of offbeat pixie Shannyn Sossasmon. In this world, such a sexual magnet’s decision to deactivate for over a month is a monumental, life-altering decision, which does not help Hartnett uncover the lighter side of his expressively furrowed eyebrows. Usually playing a farcical situation seriously enhances its comedy; somehow, Hartnett and this movie work together to undermine this long-held comedic principle.

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Hollywood Homicide is a little funnier, in part because writer-director Ron Shelton comes up with a genuine novelty in a cop movie about cops who’d really rather be pursuing completely different careers, whether acting (in Hartnett’s case) or real estate (in Ford’s). The part hints that Hartnett could have kind of a Keanu Reeves energy: a beautiful man with an unconventional mix of Zen exterior and inner toughness. But Hartnett’s specific character in Hollywood Homicide gets pretty watery outside of his central gimmick; he’s kind of a yoga-teaching flake, kind of a passive lothario, kind of a hapless cop; the arc seems like it’s supposed to be that he comes to terms with his abilities as a detective over the course of the movie’s case, but the movie shunts that development off to the very end. Hartnett himself is almost too convincing as the actor half-assing his way through another job. (He’s funnier in a more satirical take on acting in Operation Fortune .) Neither early-2000s movie has much fun with Hartnett’s handsomeness or sexuality. At times, he appears to be surrendering to his own good looks. Despite the whole text of the movie classifying him as a potentially awkward cop-actor hybrid, Hartnett played several more cops in noir-ish movies where his performances didn’t exactly stand out, even with his good looks. HE wasn’t exactly mastering the Bruce Willis balance.

Trap returns Hartnett to his horror roots, and the film isn’t entirely unaware of his hotness; there’s a laugh-out-loud moment where his character, who is taking his daughter to a big concert when he realizes the police are hunting him, catches the eye of an ill-tempered pop star (played by a cameoing Kid Cudi). But no one stars in a Shyamalan movie to look cool, least of all when cast as a dad – and indeed, Hartnett makes a meal of his dad jokes and attempts to please the daughter he clearly, sincerely loves. When he molds his deep voice into corny fatherly excitement, he sounds a bit like Brendan Fraser – another recently resurrected star of that late ’90s/early ’00s zone. Fraser was doing, on average, much sillier movies during his and Hartnett’s mutual heyday, and there’s something powerful about Hartnett embody that kind of goofiness with his teen-idol and twentysomething-hottie past well behind him. He doesn’t look wildly different from his old self, either; it’s more to do with how he carries himself, with less of the reticence that often goes hand-in-hand with the attractively reluctant.

Hartnett still plays some things close to the vest in Trap ; his character is keeping vast and terrible secrets from his family, hiding his damage and his evil deeds. But what makes the performance work so well is that Hartnett resists the suburban-bland phoniness that makes for easy, funny contrasts. He never really indicates that the dad stuff is a mask for his rage, or an offshoot of it. He’s a dorky, doting father, and also a ruthless killer, and it’s only outside circumstances that force a negotiation between the two. Maybe he works so well in this dual part because he now recognizes how for so many people, a Hollywood Type – whether reluctant sex symbol or prolific murderer – will eventually have trouble coexisting with a normal guy.

Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com , too.

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