Josh Hartnett Talks ‘Verity,’ Aging in Hollywood, and His Former Status as a Teen Heartthrob

In recent years, Hartnett, now age 48, has initiated his return to blockbuster cinema. He nabbed roles in Christopher Nolan’s best-picture winner, Oppenheimer, and was the leading man of Trap, the M. Night Shyamalan thriller about a serial killer taking his daughter to a pop concert designed for his capture. Now, Hartnett acts opposite Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in director Michael Showalter’s pulpy psychological thriller Verity, where he plays the titular character’s potentially shadowy spouse. Next, he both stars and produces the Netflix series Below, out October 8, which centers on strange occurrences in a remote Canadian coastal fishing town.

Hartnett says he’s now able to embrace more film and TV work “mostly because my wife is so excellent at picking up the slack when I go away”—but has no intention of getting caught up in the Hollywood feedback loop. “It’s a trade-off because there are more things happening in Hollywood that I might be able to participate in and maybe I’ll miss a job or two,” he tells VF, “but it’s so worth it to me. I couldn’t imagine not living the way that we do so far from everything and just having a really normal life with kids.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: For most of Verity, your character’s motives are unclear to the audience. How did you keep that core mystery alive?

Josh Hartnett: The thing that everybody talks about when they talk about this book is are you team manuscript or are you team letter? I didn’t want to divide the character, but I wanted the character to exist in both realities. I was able to speak to Colleen about it before we started and asked what her intention was: “Are you team letter or team manuscript?” And she told me, but that didn’t change how I had to play the character. It was putting together a puzzle in a way that it felt plausible that both sides could be correct. Michael had the interesting job of dealing with a landscape that has an expectation for a film like this, and then to try and figure out how to surprise the audience. My job on the set was relatively straightforward.

In terms of your awareness of the Colleen Hoover universe, I assume you saw some of the drama that happened on It Ends With Us. Did that affect your decision to take on a role in the movie?

I was not particularly aware of Colleen’s oeuvre. I only read the book Verity after I read the script. But what drew me into the project was the people involved. Annie and Dakota were already doing it. Michael was already doing it. Stacey Sher was already producing. All these great people had come together to make something elevated. And then the script itself had this ambiguous ending, which I thought was so unusual. You don’t get to see that in modern films, especially other studio films. And I thought, oh, this could be really exciting to have people come out of the theater, argue about something that’s not the end of the world and have a fun time with it. I love that debate. And it just doesn’t come along very often.

I didn’t really think about the other films that had come before. But I looked at the landscape of what Colleen Hoover’s other films were like and realized that this film is so much different from those. I don’t really think it’s living in that same universe. And so it didn’t feel like it had to be affected by all that stuff. It was hopeful that people wouldn’t be, Oh, it’s just another one in a line of these films. They would see it as a standalone piece. So I didn’t feel like it had to affect us.

The film presents success from two different vantage points—Hathaway’s Verity as the star author and Johnson’s Lowen as the undiscovered talent. Do you feel like you’re closer to the Verity side of your career?

I feel way more like an undiscovered talent. I feel like only now am I getting to work with the people that I want to work with on a level that I want to work with them on. When you’re younger in this business, and rightfully so, directors and studios will look at you as someone who’s going to help make their film, but they’re not looking at you as a direct collaborator usually. When you have established a lot more work under your belt, they have more of an understanding of who you are, and directors look at you more as a collaborator. And so, if I’m lucky enough, I feel like I’m just getting started. I’m only now coming into a place where I can make the more interesting choices in the films that I take on that will then establish me as the kind of actor that I believe I’ve always wanted to be.

Moving to the UK seems to have offered you a lot of personal perspective. Is being away from the American political landscape an added benefit to living overseas?

The tension is so high right now in the States. I mean, it’s palpable, but I can’t say that the UK is all that different right now. It feels like the UK is heading down a road of division in a similar fashion. Unfortunately, it’s this new landscape that we all have to navigate where sides don’t really speak to each other anymore. They speak over each other and they demonize and it doesn’t feel like there’s a space for resolution. I mean, I know who I blame for that. I think we’ve been cordoned off and I hope the rhetoric can calm down and that people can start to see each other as people again.

Do you ever choose projects because you endorse what message they send out into the world?

I have quite a few times in the past chosen films that are based off of my own beliefs, and I feel like it’s a great driver. The weird thing about being an actor is that it’s not my project. So even if I get into a movie thinking that we’ve got a political point of view, if the director doesn’t agree, then it doesn’t turn out that way. And so I have to be careful about that. When I was younger, I threw caution to the wind more frequently thinking, oh, the best will come out. People will understand what I’m trying to say or who I am as a person. But very often you’re misunderstood.

You’ve said you felt misunderstood by a Vanity Fair profile from early in your career. That it felt like you were “set up to fail.”

I mean, you say a lot of things when you’re on press tours and sometimes you say something that’s a little bit punchy and you didn’t mean to be. But I was at a point in my life where I was feeling more easily defined by the press coverage that was swirling around me because I was young. And when you’re in your early 20s or late teens at a major moment in your life, and a major publication sort of takes a shot at you in a way, it’s scary. You’re like, Oh my God, this is not what I thought of myself and I don’t want people to see me this way. But what happens naturally through growing older and experience, is people’s perceptions don’t affect your day-to-day life in the same way that they did. Everybody still cares that they are represented in the way they’d like. But if a story comes out and represents me in a light that I don’t find flattering, it doesn’t ruin my month anymore.

Did returning to the zeitgeist with roles in Oppenheimer and Trap feel like an intentional industry reintroduction?

So much of it was luck. I was making films that were much more interesting to me , but no one was really seeing them because they didn’t have the backing of a director with a lot of clout or a studio. And, honestly, I switched agencies. I moved to an agency that was much better at integrating those two things. And they said, “Well, why don’t you call people that you want to work with that you’ve met before and tell them that you like their work?” I mean, that’s very embarrassing for me, as it would be for anybody.

Is it?

Yes, to call a director out of the blue and be like, “Hey, just so you know, in case you’ve been wondering, I’m available.”

But I made a couple of phone calls, they made a few phone calls, and luckily people were still interested in having me in their films. And I was able to do roles that were completely different from what I’d been offered before in the more zeitgeisty films. Guy Ritchie was making a movie in London, and said, ‘Have Josh come to the set.’ It was the first day of filming. He was like, ‘Look, I only have the name of a character. It’s not in the script, really. We could make this together. Do you trust me?’ And I was able to play a comedic foil to Jason Statham’s character in Wrath of Man, and improv. That was an incredibly fresh thing to do with my career. Then Chris Nolan called. From that came M. Night Shyamalan. It was just having a new energy about me because I had new people working with me that made a phenomenal difference.