Josh Hartnett loves a challenge.
The risk of falling flat on his face or soaring as an actor is something he admittedly finds irresistible. “There’s that huge disparate gambler in me, I guess,” he said over Zoom from a hotel room in New York City.
So, it makes sense that he couldn’t pass up playing the lead in M. Night Shyamalan’s new psychological thriller “Trap,” where a father and daughter attend a massive concert for a pop star named Lady Raven, where the dad, portrayed by Hartnett, learns that the event is a setup to catch an elusive serial killer. Said serial killer is him.
As Cooper, Hartnett essentially had to play two roles in one — the outwardly charming prodigal father and “The Butcher,” a secret serial killer.
“His veneer, his mask that he’s putting out to the world, is really well intact at the beginning of this film. And in that mask, he has created this character of the ultimate ‘girl dad,’ who is a hero who saves people from fires and is very good to his wife, always bringing her gifts,” he said. Hartnett was thrilled by the cracks that began to appear in Cooper’s mask, and he couldn’t pass up the part.
“It’s like, if this characterization doesn’t work, the whole movie fails,” Hartnett said. “And I love that pressure.”
The 46-year-old actor treated Cooper as a singular character. He refused to watch any TV shows or films after landing the part. “I didn’t want [him] to be like anyone else,” he said. It helped that he felt safe with Shyamalan because of how he’s worked with actors “in this kind of twisted way” — and because, truthfully, Hartnett can’t say he was drawn to playing Cooper based on any element of his character.
Making him feel credible, real and consistent amid the chaos of his situation was alluring. From an acting point of view, he was drawn to how Cooper, a serial killer, was capable of self-revelation – that a part of the artifice had somewhat become real, and he actually cares about his daughter. “All that mixed in with the psychopathy of a totally deranged serial killer just seemed too delicious to not be a part of,” Hartnett said.
When it came to the concert aspect of the film, Hartnett had little experience seeing pop stars live himself — unless it was with his daughters for Taylor Swift.
“Pop is kind of at the bottom of my list usually,” he said. Because his dad was a musician who starred in rock and jazz-style bands, he grew up on a music diet of those genres. “[My dad] played with Al Green for a bit, so [I listened to] a lot of really interesting soul and funk bands. That kind of got into my DNA.”
Feigning an interest in pop was hardly the most challenging part of portraying Cooper. Instead, it was entering the psyche of a serial killer. “It’s a very dark place to be even when the character is being entertaining,” he explains. “That psychology was not the most fun.”
But after more than 25 years in show business, the Minnesota-born star is a pro. He reached heartthrob status after roles like ultimate bad-boy Zeke Tyler in “The Faculty,” high school hunk Trip Fontaine in “The Virgin Suicides,” combat pilot Captain Danny Walker in “Pearl Harbor,” and web designer Matt Sullivan, who goes on a sex sabbatical for Lent, in “40 Days and 40 Nights.”
That “intensity of fame” wasn’t something he was prepared for at the time. “I didn’t know exactly who I wanted to be yet,” he said. “And to have people wanting something from me that I didn’t see myself as, I had to reject it. I just had to be myself.”
One role, in particular, where he followed his own path instead of pursuing something was with “Mozart and the Whale,” where he played Donald Morton, a character with Asperger’s. “Instead of doing some big-budget, heroic film, I decided to do ‘Mozart and the Whale,’ about two autistic people finding love. I thought maybe the audience would be interested in me going in that trajectory, but I didn’t realize like how powerful the business apparatus could be.”
Still, Hartnett diversified his body of work. Over time, he starred in the neo-noir crime film “Sin City,” the action thriller “Wrath of Man,” as well the horror film “30 Days of Night.” In retrospect, he’s uncertain whether the heartthrob label affected his career for the better.
“I don’t know if that sort of heartthrob thing was a hindrance or help,” he said. “I think, maybe it helped initially, then maybe it was a hindrance, and then maybe it’s helping again.”
“Trap,” however feels like a comeback for Hartnett. Despite having consistently worked throughout his career, Hartnett largely strayed from the limelight, trading life in Hollywood for a quieter one in the U.K. A role in “Oppenheimer” as the nerdy Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence felt like the beginning of a renaissance — a long-awaited return to the mainstream.
However, according to Hartnett, he never really “left” the mainstream. “I wanted to do a different thing with my career that was more consistent with what I believe to be an interesting career trajectory,” he said. “But people didn’t see me that way within Hollywood, so I wasn’t offered the same roles that other actors might have been offered. The movies that I did make weren’t given the platform that some of my earlier films were given. But I’ve always been the same actor.”
Since his career took off at a young age, Hartnett saw how “dangerous” it could be if he lost himself in Hollywood. “So I just stuck to my guns, and the awesome thing is that people have found me more intriguing as I’ve gotten older.”
The roles he’s wanted to play — and has continued to play — are what people want to see from him. “I’m able to play really disparate roles and have them be now in larger films that are being promoted by big companies. It’s really cool.”
For fans of a certain age, his role as Trip in “The Virgin Suicides” has remained an essential part of the zeitgeist. While the experience was “formative” for Hartnett, he recalled the public’s reception differently.
“I gotta say, when ‘The Virgin Suicides’ came out, it was not hit,” he said. But he’s” glad it has legs now,” so people can revisit some of his other work, like Atsuko Hirayanagi’s late-in-life rom-com “Oh Lucy.”
“Having a bunch of young people making a movie for very little money and having it have social impact set me off on a track of trying to do that over and over again — tiny, tiny films that I thought could really have an effect and be really cool in the marketplace,” he said.
Reflecting further on the film’s 25th anniversary, Hartnett said he almost collaborated with Sofia Coppola on a film a few years ago, which he won’t name. “There was a movie that she was doing a few years ago that we talked about, at length, and I really wanted to be in it, but she decided to go a different way.”
Still, he’d jump at the chance to work with Coppola again: “in a heartbeat.”
“Trap” opens in theaters from Warner Bros. on Friday, August 2.
