Josh Hartnett didn't mean to become a heartthrob. In a new interview with Variety , the 45-year-old actor revealed that his only intention was to be a serious actor. "It was never my intention to be a heartthrob," he says.
Hartnett stole hearts starring in movies like Halloween H20 , The Faculty , The Virgin Suicides , Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down . But he didn't care if people found him swoonworthy, only that they would take him seriously. "It had an effect on me, in which I had to fight against it.
I really wanted to be a serious actor. What I didn't understand is that I was in an amazing position, working with terrific directors on terrific projects," he says. "For all intents and purposes, it didn't matter how people viewed me in tabloids or whatever — as long as I was working within the industry.
But I was too young to really understand that, to make the differentiation." He continued, "To me, the world had seen me as a thing that I didn't feel like inside. I wanted to rectify that.
" Flash forward decades later from his early acting days and Hartnett is still a heartthrob. But, he's also a very serious actor, having recently taken on heavy roles. For example, he played an astronaut facing an unfathomable tragedy in episode three of season 6 of Black Mirror , a physicist in Oppenheimer , and will portray a serial killer in M.
Night Shyamalan's upcoming Trap . Aside from his and wife Tamsin Egerton's rare red carpet appearance in March as they stepped out for a pre-O.