Christopher Nolan is clarifying just how close Josh Hartnett was to playing Bruce Wayne.
The “Batman Begins” director recalled during the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he did meet with Harnett for the role of Batman; however, the actor never screen-tested for the role.
“I met with Josh and if I recall, he was a young actor whose work I was very interested in,” Nolan said. “It never got that far…I had an initial conversation with him but he had read my brother’s script for ‘The Prestige’ at the time and was more interested in getting involved with that,” he continued. “So it never went further than that.”
Hartnett stars in Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” with Nolan admitting working with the actor has been years in the making.
“I think over the last few years he’s done some really interesting things and really looked to stretch himself,” Nolan said. “So I was really pretty excited to get him to come and play Ernest Lawrence. I think he does a really great job in the film.”
Hartnett previously revealed to Playboy in 2015 that he allegedly turned down the role of Batman for Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.
“People don’t like being told no. I don’t like it. I learned my lesson when Christopher Nolan and I talked about Batman. I decided it wasn’t for me,” Hartnett said. “Then he didn’t want to put me in ‘The Prestige.’ They not only hired their Batman for it [Christian Bale] but also hired my girlfriend [Scarlett Johansson] at the time. That’s when I realized relationships were formed in the fire of that first Batman film and I should have been part of the relationship with this guy Nolan, who I felt was incredibly cool and very talented
He added at the time, “I was so focused on not being pigeonholed and so scared of being considered only one thing as an actor. I should have thought ‘well then, work harder, man.’ Watching Christian Bale go on to do so many other things has been just awesome. I mean, he’s been able to overcome that. Why couldn’t I see that at the time?”
The former teen heartthrob recently told The Independent UK that his approach to acting has made for a non-“movie star” career.
“I have an artistic mind, and I want to follow things that are somehow just outside of my understanding,” Hartnett said. “Does that necessarily make for a cohesive career in a movie star sense? No. But before the last few years I just had less of a chance to do it. There’s no reliance on ‘the movie star’ like there was in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Box office was paramount in business back then, and if you were someone they considered an asset in that sense, you were expected to do a certain thing. They were very precious about that, and there were a lot of people trying to keep me in a box.”
Hartnett added that he turned down playing Superman and took a meeting about playing Batman for Nolan.
“So here’s what happened: Warner Bros wanted me to do one of their superhero films. Chris Nolan was directing one of their superhero films. I met him. I talked to him about it. It wasn’t something that was interesting to me at the time,” Hartnett said. “I was on a different path to a lot of actors. And I was more interested in a film that Chris’s brother had written – ‘The Prestige.’ I loved Chris as a filmmaker, and I really wanted to work with him, and I was hoping that if I was straight-up honest with him about not wanting to do the superhero movie, maybe I could do ‘The Prestige.’”
Hartnett was not cast in “The Prestige,” and Christian Bale played Batman. However, the actor noted that everything happened for a reason.
“The thing about genius filmmakers is that they’re always gonna be around, so I hoped at one point that we’d work together,” Hartnett concluded. “And, look, here we are. I feel really lucky that he still saw me as somebody he wanted to work with all these years later. I’m a big believer in things working out when they’re supposed to.”
