Josh Hartnett stars in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, which comes out in August. Given the buzz and excitement from the trailer, I think it will be another big success for Shyamalan. And for Hartnett, who is sort of going through a career renaissance at the moment. The fact that he’s the lead in a buzzy summer movie is wonderful too! This is what we always wanted for him, the chance to weave in between big, important movies, indie films and popcorn-entertainment. Well, Josh is finally there. It took him several decades, but now he realizes that he can actually do all of that. He recently spoke to Variety about his career and more. Some highlights:

He was so worried that ‘Pearl Harbor’ would define his career but now he doesn’t care: “I love my work and I want to put it out there and I want people to enjoy it. But like me, personally, I don’t feel the way that I did when I was younger, because I was undefined. I was 19, 20, 21 years old. So, I was still trying to figure out who I was. Something of that magnitude that everybody knew about and sort of thought of me as the character, had an effect on me that I kicked back against. It was always something that I had to contend with at that age, and I was still trying to figure out what I meant to myself and to people around me. I don’t think that could happen again at the age of 45 — I hope I’ve got a little bit more there there.”

Working with Christopher Nolan, Raoul Peck, Guy Ritchie and M. Night Shyamalan: “I love experimentation in film. And these guys are still at the very top of their game in experimenting in film. I’ve never been anti [mainstream films]; I just was anti-paint by numbers. I want to work with people who are, for lack of a better term, artists. I’ve always been able to do that, luckily, but some of those films were not received by the public the same way that I’d hoped, and they were small.”

The Virgin Suicides: He looks back at “The Virgin Suicides,” noting that at first, it wasn’t a monetary success but became a classic — “not a cult classic, a classic,” he points out. “My hope was for all of these films that they would be able to kind of rise to that level. Some of them are better than others, but I think all were worthy swings.”

Would he do another TV series? “I would hesitate probably to go back into a full, multi-year series unless it’s really, really good, and it has to be able to evolve. There are worse things than something becoming successful, but if it becomes successful and it’s a single environment or the character doesn’t seem to have much room to grow or fall apart, then you’re stuck. I have ADHD. I’ll lose it.”

Why he signed on to ‘Trap’: “The script was just batsh-t crazy. I was like, ‘YES!’ The character is wonderful. I can’t say anything about it, because he’ll kill me. But the characters are all wonderfully complex.”

He used to push back hard on the ‘heartthrob’ label: “It was never my intention to be a heartthrob…[but it was] the wrong approach to even acknowledge it. I didn’t have the presence of mind to do that because I was so young. 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. 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.”

[From Variety]

I’m glad he’s at a place where he can acknowledge that he sort of screwed up because he was fighting against imaginary “heartthrob” demons. The man acted as if being seen as someone with pin-up handsomeness was some kind of cross to bear, rather than an opportunity to get in those meetings and audition for those directors. Pretty privilege is real and he felt attacked by his own privilege! But it was also about his age and inexperience too – he really felt like he was in the trenches because Michael Bay made him a movie star before he was ready for any of it.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.