I meet Josh Hartnett, the 30-year-old Hollywood star of the blockbuster Pearl Harbor who made his debut on the West End stage this week, in a stark, airless rehearsal room in south London.
The lights flash on and off at random and Hartnett, at 6ft 3in, folds himself uncomfortably into a plastic chair. He wears jeans, T-shirt and a beanie hat, and still has the heart-throb looks that got him spotted by a talent scout as a teenager. Yet despite more than a decade in the limelight he is supremely uncomfortable being scrutinised.
He says he hates the “fame game”; that he's just a regular guy; that he despises the trappings of celebrity –— yet he's so hemmed in by publicists and minders that he gives every impression of believing himself to be really very famous. The West End producer Nica Burns sits next to him and occasionally answers questions for him. And boy, does he hate being asked about Heath Ledger, who was a friend. “I'm not even going to go there,” he replies, unhappy, when I ask whether he misses him. Subsequent British interviewers, it turns out, are told not to mention Ledger as a result.
Why so defensive? He says he's had bad experiences with the press, and most often — he implies — during his year-long relationship with Scarlett Johansson, with whom he lived in New York. His silence on the subject of former girlfriends is absolute, and perhaps fair enough: he says he's been stalked by the US paparazzi and that even stepping outside his front door became difficult at one stage. “People have written wild things about me,” he complains. “The trick so many people learn, and that I am reluctant to learn, is to be hurt and cover it up and pretend that everything is OK all the time when it's not.
“I don't like to act in my personal life. I like to be straightforward … Look, I started this very young, and I haven't had media training, so go figure.”
Hartnett is appearing in the stage adaptation of the 1988 tear-jerker Rain Man, a movie that won Oscars for Dustin Hoffman and director Barry Levinson, and popularised the concept of the autistic savant. He plays Charlie Babbitt, the Tom Cruise role; the manipulative, money-grabbing younger brother to the numerically gifted Raymond (played here by British actor Adam Godley). It's a bold project, partly because the film, essentially a road movie, looms so large in the cultural consciousness but also because Hartnett hasn't acted on stage for 12 years.
“I wanna stretch myself,” he says languidly. “Try new things. I get quite fed up being on a film set day after day, six days a week. It can get to be a grind. I want to have what I do always feel fresh and new, and [this play] does to me… I mean, a film adaptation is not necessarily my first choice for the first piece of theatre I've done in 12 years but the script was so impressive, and I wanted to show myself that I could do it still. Basically, I have a short attention span, so it'll be good for me to try and stay in one space, doing the same thing for four months.”
It was on stage at theatre school in New York that Hartnett was first noticed. A talent scout whisked him off to screen auditions in LA. He was 17 and very, very handsome — in that mildly unruly fashion that often passes on American TV for proper teenage rebelliousness (he auditioned on several occasions for a part in Dawson's Creek, and I'm amazed he didn't get one).
For a while, however, Hartnett wasn't convinced that he even wanted to be an actor; and certainly not an actor hired primarily for his beauty in teen horror flicks such as Halloween H20, one of his first features. Yet a breakthrough role in Sofia Coppola's acclaimed The Virgin Suicides was followed by Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down; and then the epic Pearl Harbor — the part (Captain Danny Walker) that was destined to propel him to Hollywood superstardom.
“I became popular very young,” he says, with a huge sigh. “I viewed myself as just a young actor trying to figure out how to do well, and, you know, making mistakes and learning and growing.
“And then I happened to be picked up for a certain movie, and they let the publicity machine go wild, and I ended up at the centre of that — and I was billed as a lot of things that I never claimed to be.”
Hartnett was the next Harrison Ford; the next Tom Cruise; the next money-spinning action hero. Never mind that the film was a critical flop, Hartnett's agent was lining up one big movie after another, including Superman, which he turned down. “Fame was initially this kind of blunt tool that was thrust into my hands very young,” he says.
By far the most interesting thing about him, I think, is his decision to abdicate from the mega-celebrity status Pearl Harbor bestowed upon him. To turn your back on the fame so many people seem to crave nowadays is surely the act of a complex, thoughtful person. It's a choice of which he's proud. After Pearl Harbor he simply went home, to liberal Minnesota, where he and his three siblings were brought up largely by their father, a property manager and jazz musician who once played with Al Green.
For the next year he dodged his increasingly irate agents (“Yeah, that was pretty much the end of that relationship”) and hung out with old friends. He describes himself as a “totally odd” kid, growing up, a daydreamer who found his niche in the theatre; and just for a moment, there's a flash of dry wit here, too. As a young teenager he took a pocket-money job at a video store, and got to watch movies all day, a story that reminds me of Quentin Tarantino, who also worked in a video shop, pre-Reservoir Dogs, and thereby indulged his own obsession for film. “Yeah, that's cool,” replies Hartnett, when I mention QT. “But I wasn't like Tarantino. I was like the comic store guy from The Simpsons. That was more me. It was pretty much the only job I could hold down.”
Yet he denies that he suffered any kind of crisis post-Pearl Harbor; he just didn't enjoy, maybe even get, his pin-up status. “Partially, I didn't know what [fame] was good for,” he says. “Now I've figured out that you can use it to raise awareness for certain charities, certain issues.
But it was living in a goldfish bowl that made it so difficult. Some people would say that's a plus but it's not something I can do. I've retreated from this idea of chasing fame. It's too much for me to handle.”
Instead, he has taken a year off here, a year off there, and made movies he really wanted to make — Hollywood Homicides, working with Harrison Ford, Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia; the crime thriller Lucky Number Slevin and superior horror feature 30 Days of Night. He is also starting to produce his own films, and has released a movie called August, set in 2001 — the month before 9/11 — against the backdrop of dotcom meltdown in New York. Hartnett stars, and — wow — David Bowie has a cameo.
“I've gone back to that idea of trying to steadily grow as an artist,” he says. “I'm not rejecting the idea that I've been very lucky but if I can use the fame factor to create these films I think are intelligent, cool and different it's the best of all worlds. There's a balance you must strike in this industry, I'm not ignorant of that fact. I just want to make sure I'm falling on the right side of it …” He pauses, winces slightly. “The side of integrity over monetary gain or fame, I guess.”
He is a worrier, he says. What does he worry about? “Everything. What's not to worry about? Seriously. Some people just have this personality. It starts on a mundane, domestic level then it moves into personal relations then into national or world affairs.” I don't think he's entirely joking here. “If everything is going well in my life then I start to read the papers more and I start to worry about everything I can't deal with. They say wisdom is knowing what you can fix and what you can't change. I'm very unwise.”
He will miss the US election but professes a healthy degree of cynicism about the influence of Hollywood stars on proceedings (“a lot of actors have decided to spout out their opinions; I don't care to be involved in that”). Yet he still parties when he can, or when he's allowed to. So far in London, he's barely got out of this windowless rehearsal room but his friends in The Kings of Leon are coming to town and he expects to hang out with them. He cites some edgy New York bands as his current favourites. Not that he falls out of limos, though — heavens no! “I couldn't enjoy [going out] when I was young,” he says, “because I was a worrier, and I thought I don't want to be one of those jerks who spends every night out in clubs trying to find girls, or whatever.
“Then I kind of got a little more secure in who I was, and realised I could have a good time occasionally. I don't go to clubs often but I like to see bands, you know.”
As for London, well, trouble is, Hartnett thinks the British papers will hassle him while he's here. On the one hand, he's up for meeting the normal Londoner: “If I have time and I end up in a situation where people want to talk about something I've done, or they're doing, or just movies or acting or the weather here and how it sucks, of course I'll talk about that.” But on the other, he's sure hordes of gossip columnists and sneaky informers are watching his every move so they can write more mean, made-up stories. “When you have that sort of fame and attention being paid to you by the paparazzi you're never going to meet anyone, so what's the point? If you step outside the door you end up in a situation where people have seen you and they can say whatever they want to say about you, and the only factor they need is that you were there. That's all they need.”
So look: I'm sure Hartnett will be a success in Rain Man, and I'm sure, when he's off-guard, he's a most likeable young man. But when I see him he's clearly too uptight about his fame — the very thing he wants to escape — to speak his mind.
Some days later I receive a call from his British publicist. Josh didn't feel relaxed during his interview and would I like to meet him again? Sure, fine, I say, surprised. Later, the same publicist phones me back. Er, Josh's US publicist says I can have 10 minutes with him, that she'd like to vet the questions, and that there are certain caveats and conditions and … As they say in America: Enough already.
Rain Man is at the Apollo Theatre. Information: 0844 412 4658, wwwrainmanonstage.com.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23546815-details/Josh Hartnett: I’m really just a regular guy (but+don%E2%80%99t+ask+me+to+chill+out)/article.do
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