Josh Hartnett, the discreet return of this ephemeral boyfriend from America who decided to slam the door on Hollywood | people

Not in trendy restaurants, not at parties, not on red carpets. Anyone who walks around Hollywood hoping to bump into Josh Hartnett in one of those places that stars are supposed to visit should look elsewhere. The actor from Saint Paul (Minnesota, USA, 45 years old) has not been there for long. He lives peacefully, with his three children and his wife, also an actress. Tamsin Egerton in a small town in Surrey, in the English countryside. He is close to his in-laws, who help them with the children, and a stone's throw from London by train, as he usually travels. The Hollywood glitz is far from him, and by his own decision. He never left, but he left a media circus in which, at the beginning of his career, a quarter of a century ago, he found himself drawn, condemned. Until he said enough. When it suits him, he knows how to come back. And this is precisely one of his moments.

Hartnett hasn't retired. If you look at his career, beyond a pandemic hiatus, he's been active almost since the day he set foot in Los Angeles, in 1998. When the promising high school child sports star's career went awry when he tore his ACL, acting was his B option. But it turns out that playing Huckleberry Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer He loved it, and when he went off to New York University to study art, he kept poking his nose into small plays… until an agent tracked him down and took him to California, where he began working nonstop. In his first film, Halloween: H20was Jamie Lee Curtis' son and even appeared on the poster. The second was the teen horror hit Facultyand I turned 20 on the set of the third, Virgin suicides. His director, Sofia Coppola, gave him a bottle of wine: Congratulations, you're not a teen idol anymore. He couldn't drink it, he wasn't of legal age.

This film set a standard for Hartnett's work. First, because he learned to prepare his roles well. He has commented in some interviews that at that time he was a grandson, not an actor, and that he had to pull himself together. He spoke with the authors of the books on which the films were based (in this case Jeffrey Eugenides); saw the protagonists, if they were real; I trained, I ate, I did what they did. But remember also today Coppola's beginnings, how he was a little boy of 19 years old. Virgin suicides It was like a group of friends rowing together. I think I always look for that experience whenever I make a film, he said in a conversation with The Guardian almost four years ago.

So what happened didn't please him very much. I studied art in New York, I painted. I was never the most popular boy in school. Suddenly, people were chasing me down the street, I recalled in a conversation with Variety a few months ago. Especially when in 2001 this blockbuster came out Pearl Harborwhich grossed $450 million worldwide. So, he says, he thought about doing it, and he thought maybe he wasn't prepared for a movie of that caliber. “Ultimately, I decided to do it because the rejection would have been based on fear. And then it would define me, which means I was right about that fear,” he says now.

That 2001 was the year of overproduction, but also of Black Hawk Down. No pair: 2002 with 40 days and 40 nights2003 with Hollywood: Homicide Departmentwith Harrison Ford, 2004 and 2005 with The city of sin2006 with The Slevin Affair and the famous The black dahlia…In less than a decade, Josh Hartnett's face was everywhere, from billboards to teenage girls' folders. His fame was on par with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, or Matt Damon at the time. And just at the peak of the peak, he disappeared. I never stopped acting. Since then, he's released a movie almost every year, with a break between 2011 and 2014; Oh, he was on the show for a few years. Penny Dreadful. But all this in small minor projects, nothing Hollywood.

They offered him to become Superman. The check was for 100 million, but he wasn't interested at all. Batman too, but he only wanted to meet his director, then a very unknown Christopher Nolan. They had only one conversation; the chosen one was Christian Bale. In any case, he wasn't in the running. I decided to have a life. Put that first. That was always my goal, I confessed in an interview with the review Mr Porter in January 2021. I began to realize that I had to act in a certain way in the market, otherwise I was going to lose my career. And the truth is that I had never seriously thought about it as a career until then. Deep down, it was very innocent. Don't try to burn bridges or be the rebel of the season, much less create an image based on it. That's just how it was.

It may sound innocent, or even fake, but time has shown that it’s not a strategy. The guys at the top are terrified that someone will come after them. If that’s your true ambition, to always be at the top, you’re going to spend your life looking over your shoulder. I never wanted that. I want to do good work with the people I love and spend my free time with the people I care about, he admitted to the same magazine. A lot of people will find the fastest way to get from point A to point B. If that means losing a little bit of baggage, like your friends or your connection to home, so be it. It’s going to be a lot easier if you interact with people in the industry, because they’ll hire you for the next job. A lot of people fall into that trap, but I feel very connected to my long-time friends and family. I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose those relationships. These people make me who I am. I asked these questions before I pursued a dream in Hollywood.

The path worked for him. He had laid a foundation broad enough to sustain a career, but outside the system of the big studios, with which he never understood well, nor with repeating the same role or creating a brand with himself. He returns to business when he wants. The big leap was last year, with an episode of the series Black mirrorand with his small role in one of the feature films of the year: this time he worked with Nolan in Oppenheimer, winner of seven Academy Awards (which she attended for the first time in over a decade). In a conversation with the British newspaper The Independent Last summer, before the release of the atomic bomb movie in which he plays physicist Ernest Lawrence, he said the post-production role was not one of his favorites. Promoting a movie? No one is going to say I'm good at it, he admitted, explaining that fame still wasn't his thing. Being famous is a full-time job because every time you leave the house, they're following you, he explained, recalling that his fans and paparazzi were constantly following him and that he wasn't himself. He never managed to find the balance that other actors achieve.

After a season in his native Saint Paul (which drove his agents crazy), he moved to London with his family. He gets out of his corner from time to time. Now he will have to start again, because he is the absolute protagonist of one of the films of the season, Trapfrom horror master M. Night Shyamalan, which will be released in August. Back in 2005, he told this newspaper that big productions were a path to unhappiness. He hasn't changed his mind, but it seems that this path is becoming clearer and is heading towards a comfort and happiness that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.