Well, taking the lead in two big-budget Hollywood blockbusters back to back — he followed Pearl Harbor with Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down — did change Hartnett’s life, but not at all as these heavy hitters expected. Having been taken to the top of the mountain and shown Hollywood’s promised land, Hartnett quietly walked down, packed his bags, headed back to his home state, Minnesota, and waved goodbye to Hollywood and the trappings of stardom for nearly 18 months. In the process, he turned down a role almost every other actor his age would have killed for: Clark Kent in Batman vs Superman, a film that, as it turns out, has still not been made.
“When I first started to get a certain amount of fame,” Hartnett recalls, “I didn’t want to deal with it at all, and moving back to Minnesota was kind of my way of pushing it all away. Michael Bay wouldn’t have done what I did, but I wasn’t ready to just take my success at face value. I wanted to try to eke out my own way, to etch my own path.” Hartnett, whose family background is liberal, admits he was also disturbed that he was riding to stardom playing military heroes. “I felt, ‘Am I still Josh Hartnett?’” “I think Hollywood wants its ‘hero’ prototype,” Hartnett adds, “and I think every young actor who fits that remotely gets in that canal of thought, where everybody is seeing you as this one thing. If you’re not inclined to do that sort of thing for the rest of your life, well... I wasn’t inclined to do it for two minutes! Of course, my agents were flipping out, because that was my ‘coming out’ moment, like Jake Gyllenhaal this year. And when these things hit, they only hit once. I knew that. But it was the best thing for me, because I wasn’t happy being a part of the system in that way — I never have been. Maybe that’s because of my Minnesota roots.”
It’s impossible to understand Hartnett, and his deep ambivalence about his celebrity, without understanding what it means to come from Minnesota. Although Hartnett now spends most of his time in New York — where he lives with Scarlett Johansson, no less — he keeps a house in Minnesota, which is in the snowy far north, by the Canadian border.
A majority of Minnesotans are of northern European descent — Scandinavian and German, mostly Lutheran — although Hartnett, whose background is Swedish, was brought up as a secular Catholic. To Minnesotans, there is no greater virtue than plainness: being honest, straightforward, sceptical and unpretentious; being plain-spoken. Hartnett points out that it was Minnesotans who elected as senator the late Paul Wellstone, an outspoken champion of liberal causes for whom Hartnett campaigned, in 2002, before his death in a plane crash.
“He was the only guy that always spoke his mind,” says Hartnett. “He said what he wanted to say, even if other people said he was committing political suicide. Yet he was somehow electable, because people in Minnesota respected his integrity. We’re also the same state that elected (the former pro wrestler turned actor) Jesse Ventura as governor, though. Still, we do appreciate people who speak their mind.”
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After the divorce of his parents, Hartnett and his three siblings were brought up mainly by his father, a property manager and jazz musician, in St Paul, Minnesota. Hartnett, who is a gangly 6ft 3in, had hoped to be a football player, but he had to stop playing after a bad knee injury in his late teens. Instead, he turned to acting after a stint as a clerk in a video store, where he started watching films like Trainspotting and Twelve Monkeys. When he was 17, he moved to New York to study drama, but was soon picked up by an agent and whisked off to Hollywood, quickly landing a lead role in the American TV version of Cracker.
Even then, says Hartnett, he felt uncomfortable living in Hollywood, which he had expected would be something like New York as a city. “When I got there, I found it was all spread out and everything, so suburban,” he says, still a little shocked. “I never really fit in, even though I have a lot of friends in LA and I like going back. But at that particular point in my life, I felt lonely, and I just wanted to be back in NY.” Now, particularly with Johansson as his girlfriend, he much prefers New York, partly because he finds the attentions of the LA snappers unbearable.
“The paparazzi, they’re terrible in Los Angeles,” he says. “It’s insane, but that’s only happened in the past six or seven years, when they’ve become so prevalent that they’re everywhere. I try to avoid them at all costs. I always have, because it’s not like someone just comes up and takes a picture and leaves; they stalk you. It’s a weird feeling always to have somebody watching your every move.”
Hartnett is saying this in the far corner of the lobby of New York’s chic Mercer hotel, sipping a mid-morning black coffee and an orange juice. He’s dressed so plainly — a black hooded winter jacket, a black beanie, which he keeps on even inside, a wispy goatee — that it seems both an expression of Minnesotan virtue and a necessary disguise on the New York streets. But, even heavily swaddled, it is hard to miss those soulful green eyes. Hartnett, to his dismay, found his heart-throb “Hollywood hottie ” aura even followed him back to Minnesota.
“It turns out we’ve got the same amount of little girls per capita as anywhere, and it’s even worse because they don’t see a whole lot of celebrities,” he told The New York Times soon after he’d moved back there. “This girl who lives across the way, she dances in her window for me and leaves notes in my mailbox.”
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That girl is going to be first in line to buy tickets for Hartnett’s latest film, Lucky Number Slevin. The film re-teams him with the director Paul McGuigan (Gangster No 1), with whom he made Wicker Park. An unusual, often surprising, stylised and bloody thriller, Lucky Number Slevin has a pretty astonishing cast, including Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis and Lucy Liu. Hartnett plays Slevin, a young guy who, in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity, gets embroiled in a brutal war between the bosses of New York’s criminal underworld.
The film offers Hartnett interesting new opportunities as an actor. For one thing, he spends maybe the first 20 minutes of the film dressed only in a towel, naked from below the waist up, although only Lucy Liu’s character is allowed a glimpse of what’s under the towel. And almost immediately falls for him. “I know Jason Smilovic ’s writer really well,” says Hartnett, “and I was staying at his house in New York. He turned to me one day and said, ‘What if I put you in a towel for the first half of the movie?’ I thought it was pretty funny, so I said, let’s do it, because there’s nothing more vulnerable than nudity. I thought it worked for the character.”
I ask Hartnett, who doesn’t have the overpumped upper body favoured by most young Hollywood actors, whether the long, semi-nude scenes were intended as a jokey subversion of his Hollywood-hottie image. “I try not to think about that sort of thing in any decision I ever make,” he sighs, with a weary laugh, “but I’m sure that that’s what Jason and Paul thought was funny.”
Hartnett says that although he hasn’t deliberately avoided big-budget Hollywood movies in the past couple of years, he finds himself gravitating towards smaller independent films. Even The Black Dahlia, a dark thriller about LA’s most notorious murder, based on the book by James Ellroy and directed by Brian De Palma, is a “large independent” film. In what’s seen as a follow-up to LA Confidential, Hartnett plays the lead, “Bucky” Bleichert, a former boxer who becomes a Los Angeles cop embroiled in the murder investigation and police corruption. He met Johansson on the film, which was shot in Bulgaria and Los Angeles last spring, and will be released in America later this year.
According to Hartnett, the main reason he seems to be doing more independent films is that they allow him to stretch as an actor. “On the bigger-budget blockbusters, you are forced into playing a very simple idea of a person,” he says. “You can’t get too complicated. They want you to play something really safe, and that’s limiting. In Lucky Number Slevin, I got to portray this kind of loose, unrealistic character. It was as if it totally didn’t matter throughout the entire thing what I did. It was fun for me. And it was enlightening, because you can get away with a lot more in a film than I always thought you could. I’ve noticed more and more that some of my favourite actors call themselves ‘performers’. I’ve never thought of it that way. I always thought ‘acting’ was supposed to be intense, that it was supposed to come from somewhere deep and dark within you.”
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Which again speaks to his Minnesotan upbringing. In the past, he had always felt hidebound by the need for his performances to be honest and real — plain, even — rather than playful. “Making this film, I realised that there really can be a lightness to acting sometimes,” he adds. “Normally, I don’t like to watch myself on screen at all. I think it’s really hard to see yourself, because you remember everything you wish you had done. Or you think, ‘I did something there that isn’t in the movie, because the director cut it out.’ Which really pisses you off.
“But when I saw myself in this role, I wasn’t cringing throughout the entire thing, because it was easy, because I was allowed to take chances, because I knew that the character wasn’t taking everything so seriously. As we don’t in life; we don’t take everything seriously all the time. And if we do, we’re a big bore — and who wants to watch a big bore?”
Lucky Number Slevin opens on Feb 24