Josh Hartnett Addresses Being Seen as a Heartthrob & Wanting to Be Taken Seriously as an Actor
Josh Hartnett is getting candid about his career.
The 45-year-old actor stars on the Emmy Extra Edition cover of Variety.
During the conversation, he spoke about about being a heartthrob, The Virgin Suicides, choosing roles, experimentation in film, and much more.
Keep reading to find out more…
On being a heartthrob:
“It was never my intention to be a heartthrob…I didn’t have the presence of mind to do that because I was so young. It had an effect on me, in which I had to fight against it. I really wanted to be a serious actor. What I didn’t understand is that I was in an amazing position, working with terrific directors on terrific projects. For all intents and purposes, it didn’t matter how people viewed me in tabloids or whatever — as long as I was working within the industry. But I was too young to really understand that, to make the differentiation. To me, the world had seen me as a thing that I didn’t feel like inside. I wanted to rectify that.”
On experimentation in film:
“I love experimentation in film. And these guys are still at the very top of their game in experimenting in film. I’ve never been anti [mainstream films]; I just was anti-paint by numbers. I want to work with people who are, for lack of a better term, artists. I’ve always been able to do that, luckily, but some of those films were not received by the public the same way that I’d hoped, and they were small.”
On The Virgin Suicides:
“Not a cult classic, a classic…my hope was for all of these films that they would be able to kind of rise to that level. Some of them are better than others, but I think all were worthy swings.”
On choosing roles:
“I used to be really interested in the effect of the character and what the character meant to me, personally. I wanted to find a specific type of character, when I had choices when I was younger. And then as I got older, I realized, actually, I want to choose things that are way outside of what I understand. I also don’t really care about what the character is as much as I care about the people that I’m working with. If it’s great people, then it’s my job to figure out what the character is.”