NEW YORK – Josh Hartnett is something of a bookworm.
The ‘90s heartthrob is working his way through Marlon James’ nearly 700-page “The Disappearers,” and he effusively suggests Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” as the one classic novel that “everybody should read.”
But admittedly, Hartnett had a blind spot around best-selling author Colleen Hoover before signing on for “Verity” (in theaters Oct. 2), an unnerving erotic thriller adapted from her 2018 book.
“I hadn’t read anything of hers until this came along – I don’t think I’m the market that it’s geared toward exactly,” Hartnett says with a grin, seated at a Central Park hotel. But once he dove in, “I was like, ‘This is a really elevated piece of material and I want to be a part of it.’ ”
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“Verity” follows the struggling Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who is hired as a ghost writer after the mega-popular suspense novelist Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is left paralyzed by an accident and unable to speak. Lowen temporarily moves in with the incapacitated author and her husband, Jeremy (Hartnett), so she can sift through Verity’s notes and get a feel for her writing. But she quickly uncovers disturbing secrets about Verity and the mysterious death of her young daughter, Harper (Sienna Kulovitz).
Hartnett, 48, is a dad to four kids – ages 2 through 10 – with his actress wife Tamsin Egerton. The actor was asked to go to bleak places as Jeremy wrestles with grief and betrayal, but he also had to leave that grim headspace on the set before going home to his family every day.
“You can’t bring it with you,” Hartnett says. “I can’t imagine what it would really feel like to be in his situation, but I had to put myself in his shoes. I had to find something within myself that felt like it may work for that type of loss and then use it.”
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“Verity” director Michael Showalter first saw Hartnett in the 1998 alien flick “The Faculty,” and admired the vulnerability he could bring to even the most outrageous genre fare.
“He’s very movie-star handsome, but there’s a woundedness to him,” Showalter says. “You really get that with his performance as Jeremy: He’s accessing some dark, dark stuff, but it’s always coming from a very human place.”
Hartnett isn’t one to vaunt about his acting process and he detests the idea of Method actors.
“You’re forcing everybody else around you to pay attention to you in your process,” Hartnett says matter-of-factly. Sure, he’ll draw on personal experiences and emotions, “but it doesn't mean that you have everybody call you by the name of your character and walk with an eye patch the whole time.”
Throughout the early 2000s, Hartnett was often called on to play the hunky heroic type in wartime epics such as “Pearl Harbor” and “Black Hawk Down.” But he’s always seen himself more in the fast-talking sharpshooters of “Lucky Number Slevin” and “Fight or Flight”: In his words, “characters that are a little bit nuts but also having a lot of fun.”
He raves about making Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides," and hopes more people will discover his little-seen movies "August" and "Inherit the Viper." He’s even grateful for one of his biggest stinkers, 2015’s “The Lovers,” because it’s where he met his wife.
“I’ve been chasing characters that are not like me my entire career,” Hartnett says. “I haven’t always been allowed to play them, but I’ve tried very hard to find ones that will push me beyond what people think of me. I’ve pushed back on chasing money or fame, and just focused on creating what I thought were the most interesting characters.”
Josh Hartnett says fans 'don't trust' him after this killer movie
Along with “Verity,” Hartnett has been on a Hollywood hot streak in recent years, between Christopher Nolan’s best picture-winning “Oppenheimer” and his upcoming Netflix show “Below” (streaming Oct. 8). The Minnesota native also has a modern cult classic in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” in which he plays a suburban dad-turned-torturous serial killer named Cooper, aka The Butcher.
“I knew that Night was going to make something that was deeper and more complex than maybe reviewers would have seen on a first watch,” Hartnett says of the 2024 thriller, which is set almost entirely at a pop concert. Now, “it’s something that people bring up a lot. And usually when they come up to me, they’re like, ‘I don’t know whether I trust you anymore!’ ”
Since the movie's release, “I’ve had some friends back home send me pictures of people who dressed as Cooper for Halloween, which is so bizarre to see,” Hartnett adds. He’s still holding out hope for someone to dress up as Ernest Lawrence, his nuclear physicist character from “Oppenheimer.” (“That would be pretty great.”)
Halloween is a big deal in the Hartnett household. He has a rotation of scary movies that he watches annually: “Jaws,” “The Shining” and “Poltergeist,” chief among them. His family lives on a little farm in the UK, where trick-or-treaters seldom venture.
“Nobody comes to our house. We're too far out in the middle of nowhere,” Hartnett says. “But there is a small town near us where we take the kids. They cannot wait to have a Halloween in the States some year. They think it's going to be so epic because I tell them about when I would have a pillowcase full of candy by the time I finished trick-or-treating as a kid.”
Spooky season also means carving jack-o'-lanterns and attempting costumes for their many pets, which include chickens and guinea pigs.
“We do have little outfits for our dogs, but not the goats. The goats would not be happy in those!” Hartnett says. “They’d probably eat them, too.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Josh Hartnett says he couldn't bring 'dark' new 'Verity' home with him
