Josh Hartnett has yet to master English trains. He tells me this over an apologetic text, explaining why he’s running late to our interview. It’s impossible to be angry, though. The text is so polite and self-deprecating that either his brain chemistry has been altered by country life – he’s lived with his wife, actor Tamsin Egerton, and their three children in a village in Hampshire since 2020 – or he’s the most un-Hollywood actor alive. Which is surprising, since Hollywood did its best to get its claws into him 25 years ago. Whether playing a war hero in schmaltzy epic Pearl Harbor, or the embodiment of all-American teenage smarm in Sofia Coppola’s dreamy Virgin Suicides, Hartnett spent the new millennium as movie star Silly Putty – an icon-in-waiting, or Tom Cruise with training wheels on. It wasn’t his bag.
“I couldn’t operate on that plane,” the 44-year-old explains later over coffee, his sunglasses tucked into the top of his shirt, his face on the “sweet merciful Zeus” end of the handsome spectrum. “I think actors now have more of an expectation to promote themselves in a certain way, or understand who they are to the public and foster that. I’ve never been great at celebrity.” He pulls anxiously at his collar, almost to drive it home. “Promoting a movie? There’s not gonna be one person who says I’m great at that part. I’m not very good at creating an image.”
