Josh Hartnett Always Kills It
Eleven essential performances that prove the former teen heartthrob is more than a pretty face (though it is a very pretty face).
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: former teen heartthrob, after years off the radar, experiences a late-career resurgence in adulthood, taking on exciting supporting and lead roles under acclaimed auteurs and upstart directors alike. An appreciation cycle for the performer’s work takes hold of Film Twitter as everyone collectively realizes that this dude rocks, has always rocked, and will continue to rock for years to come. It’s not an uncommon occurrence — and that’s a good thing. It’s always a joy when a performer who gets pigeonholed into a rigid definition of leading man gets the chance to break out of that mold and do engaging, outside-the-box work. The latest to join the lineage? Josh Hartnett, star of M. Night Shyamalan’s wild new thriller, Trap.
Hartnett’s had a tremendous 12 months leading up to this, memorably appearing in last year’s Best Picture winner Oppenheimer and shooting a single-scene cameo in the latest season of The Bear (which at this point is as official a welcome to the Cool Kids Club as an actor can get). With Trap inspiring divisive takes (as most Shyamalan films do) but widespread acclaim for Hartnett’s performance as Cooper Adams, a suburban dad who happens to be a notorious serial killer dubbed “the Butcher,” it’s a great time to look back at his oeuvre and remind everyone that the Penny Dreadful hive has been right: Hartnett’s always had the juice.
Halloween H20 (1998)
Harntett’s big-screen debut came in 1998’s franchise revamp Halloween H20, which sees Jamie Lee Curtis’s first return as Laurie Strode since Halloween II. Twenty years after the events of the first two films, Laurie’s done her best to settle into a new life in a small town in California, living under a false identity and serving as the principal of a boarding school. Hartnett plays John, her teenage son and a student at the school. The film’s aged quite well since its release, especially in the wake of David Gordon Green’s uneven reboot trilogy. It’s fun, well-performed (Curtis and Hartnett have excellent parent-child chemistry), and clocks in at a lean 86 minutes.
The Faculty (1998)
Hartnett’s other 1998 effort is Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi horror classic The Faculty, a movie that stars, by my approximation, every single actor who has ever lived. Hartnett is joined by Usher, Elijah Wood, Famke Janssen, Clea DuVall, Salma Hayek, Jon Stewart, Piper Laurie, and Robert Patrick (among others). The film is sort of like if Invasion of the Body Snatchers took place at Degrassi High School, blending a slick alien-invasion thriller with a campy high-school dramedy, leaning into the invasion as an allegory for feeling like an outcast in high school among strictly defined social groups. Hartnett shines as Zeke, a burnout drug dealer repeating his senior year.
It’s the sort of movie that you’d assume was a hit — only distributor Miramax inexplicably released it on Christmas Day, leading to a pretty soft theatrical run. It found its audience on home video and cable television, though, and today it stands as a bona fide cult classic.
The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Hartnett’s 1999 included an appearance in Sofia Coppola’s debut hit. The film leans into his burgeoning heartthrob status, casting him as Trip Fontaine, the local hunk who becomes briefly entwined with Kirsten Dunst’s Lux Lisbon. Trip is, as it turns out, a sleazy heel, and Hartnett excels at portraying the nastiness underneath the character’s good looks. It isn’t the last time he’d end up taking a small supporting role under the guide of an exciting director.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
When Ridley Scott casts you as one of his leads, you’ve made it. And in Black Hawk Down, one of two films Scott released in 2001 following the success of Gladiator, Hartnett has definitively made it. The rip-roaring war film may not have garnered the sort of crossover awards success that Gladiator did, but it puts Hartnett at the center of a star-studded ensemble including the likes of Ewan McGregor, Jason Isaacs, Tom Hardy, Orlando Bloom, and Hugh Dancy. It remains a fun watch — just disregard any notion of it being based on a true story.
Pearl Harbor (2001)
Hartnett holds the unique claim of having starred in arguably both the most successful war film of 2001 and the most disappointing. Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is a bloated and misguided attempt at creating a spiritual successor to Titanic, centering a romance in the middle of one of the nation’s most storied tragedies. It’s a failure on almost every level and one of the first times Hartnett really took an L on Hollywood’s main stage. The film did good business, sure, but it was critically reviled and not even in a way that makes for a good Letterboxd reclamation project 20-plus years later. Best we let this one lie.
Sin City (2005)
In 2005 Hartnett re-teamed with his Faculty director, Robert Rodriguez, for the gonzo film adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic novels. In a hyperstylized anthology film shot mostly on green screens in hypersaturated black and white, Hartnett serves as a framing device — a mournful hit man charged with targeting a couple of characters woven into the film’s narrative.
Sin City isn’t underseen by any means. The film was a box-office hit, developed a rabid cult following, and played on cable television regularly for nearly a decade. Still, it’s worth another look in the 2020s. These days, it’s commonplace for major blockbusters (especially comic-book adaptations) to be shot on soundstages with digital backgrounds and artificial lighting. Often these digital environments are meant to replicate real life, sometimes to an uncanny degree. At times it can feel like a waste of artistry. Rodriguez takes the opposite approach, one also utilized in the Wachowskis’ 2008 Speed Racer adaptation: using green screen to create a world that can’t be replicated with practical effects, in this case a real-life city drawn by Frank Miller. Sin City is violent and chaotic and at times leans into noir archetypes to the point of parody. Its sexual politics aren’t exactly its strong suit, but it still stands as a movie that captures a kind of cool few directors have been able to tap into since.
30 Days of Night (2007)
30 Days of Night is far from the best film Hartnett stars in but is still an undeniable highlight. Another graphic-novel adaptation, director David Slade (Hard Candy, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) brings Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s vampire comic of the same name to film. Hartnett stars as the sheriff of a small town in Alaska besieged by vampires during 30 days of total darkness in the winter. It’s a simple hook that provides a memorable take on the vampire subgenre and doesn’t skimp on scares.
Penny Dreadful (2014–16)
Between 2007 and 2014, Hartnett stepped back from mainstream Hollywood and instead starred in a string of experimental films and indies to varying degrees of success. The success wasn’t the point so much as the step back — Hartnett has long been vocal about how his proximity to the A-list was never a comfortable place to exist. 2014 saw him return to something resembling the mainstream as one of the leads of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful.
Penny Dreadful serves as a sort of The Avengers for public-domain horror and pulp icons, tying characters like Victor Frankenstein, the Creature, Dorian Gray, and Van Helsing into a sprawling horror-drama set in Victorian-era London. At the center are Eva Green as the enigmatic Vanessa Ives, Timothy Dalton as explorer Malcolm Murray (who bears a strong resemblance to pulp icon Allan Quatermain), and Hartnett as Ethan Chandler, an American expat running from a mysterious past. The show’s three-season run is full of compelling drama, campy horror, and fresh interpretations of familiar genre icons.
However, the series’ lasting draw is in its three leads. Penny Dreadful is part of the loose lineage of recent horror-television classics Hannibal and Evil, shows that will easily pivot from ludicrous displays of violence to transcendent exchanges between actors articulating the pain, joy, and horror that comes with being alive. Ives and Chandler in particular are two people who see themselves in one another and quietly agree that however horrifying the world they live in may be, it is ever-so-slightly easier to find the bravery necessary to endure it when standing alongside one another.
This is all simply to say that Penny Dreadful is essential Hartnett viewing. It never got its critical due (it is a genuine travesty that Eva Green never received an award for her work in any of the three seasons), but the real Hartnett Heads have known what’s up from the jump.
Wrath of Man (2021)
At once a strong contender for Guy Ritchie’s best film and one of his most underseen ones (it was released in the murky spring of 2021 when theaters were reopening but not necessarily attracting pre-COVID audience numbers), Wrath of Man marks Hartnett’s return to the big screen in a big way. The film stars Jason Statham but isn’t a one-man show, surrounding him with a killer ensemble of actors including Holt McCallany, Jeffrey Donovan, and Scott Eastwood. It’s a twisty nonlinear depiction of a series of armored car heists and the criminals responsible for them, with Statham playing a mysterious stranger who joins up with a security team charged with protecting the vehicles. It’s definitely Statham’s best role, serving as a sort of overarching metacommentary on the revenge-driven tough guys he so often plays and asking whether there’s any real difference between your typical Jason Statham character and Michael Myers.
Hartnett largely serves as (very effective) comic relief playing a guard named Boy Sweat Dave. I don’t really know what to write after that — if you read that Hartnett is playing a character named Boy Sweat Dave and don’t think Okay I gotta fire this thing up immediately, we don’t go to the movies for the same reasons.
Oppenheimer (2023)
Enough ink has been spilt on Christopher Nolan’s triumphant 2023 biopic of the father of the atomic bomb at this point. There’s a good chance you already know it’s a tremendous accomplishment and was awarded thusly at the Oscars this year. Amid the film’s sprawling ensemble (like The Faculty, this is very much a movie that seems to star Every Actor Ever), Hartnett is an easy standout. It’s one of the more brilliant utilizations of his presence. Despite his history of playing bad boys, assassins, and tortured American expats, there’s a real gentleness to Hartnett that Nolan captures well through his performance as Ernest Lawrence, an academic colleague of Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer. He’s a stabilizing presence in the life of a reckless and often careless genius, the sort of friend you want in your corner as much for their support as their ability to sternly check you when you get out of line. He also wears a pair of little glasses, and frankly it is hot.
Trap (2024)
Perhaps you have heard about the Butcher, the serial killer who’s been on the loose in the city. Perhaps you have heard about Lady Raven, the pop star with a ravenous fan base whose stadium show is going on in the city tonight. Well, don’t tell anybody, but what I’m hearing is the FBI got a tip-off that the Butcher is going to be at the show, and they’ve turned the whole arena into one big trap — once the Butcher gets in, he can’t get out.
Josh Hartnett stars in Trap as a dad taking his daughter to the Lady Raven concert. Josh Hartnett also stars in Trap as the Butcher. M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film is “This happened to my buddy Eric” cinema at its finest: campy and deranged and fun as hell, all anchored by Hartnett giving it his all as a serial-killer dad.
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