Flying start; David Eimer
Times of London   05-26-2001

Flying start
Byline: David Eimer
Edition: Final 26
Section: Features

From drama-school dropout to Hollywood's Next Big Thing -Josh Hartnett's career is set to take off with his role as a Second World War pilot in this summer's sure-fire blockbuster, Pearl Harbor

Every so often, Hollywood collectively decides which young actor is to be hailed as "the next big thing". Previous holders of this nebulous title include Julia Roberts and Matthew McConaughey, so the tag can be a blessing or a curse, but what it does do is give the lucky recipient the chance to make the jump to the A-list in super- quick time. Right now, it's the turn of Josh Hartnett to attempt the leap, and co-starring alongside Ben Affleck in this summer's most anticipated blockbuster, Pearl Harbor, is as good a way to start as any.
Sitting on the edge of his chair in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, Hartnett can be forgiven for being rendered almost speechless by his good fortune. After all, he was previously confined to teen vehicles: whether pure exploitation like 1998's Halloween H20 and The Faculty, or the more upmarket arthouse version that was 1999's The Virgin Suicides. But after a slow start, the 22-year-old warms up to reveal a wry wit and a rather un-American sense of irony that, along with his student-like attire, indicates that he's not letting it all go to his head just yet.

Hartnett is big -6ft 3in -and looks like the quarterback he once was in high school in Minnesota. Even if he would have been too large to squeeze into the cockpit of a Second World War fighter, it's easy to see why director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer plucked him out of the teeming ranks of young actors to play Danny, the best friend of Ben Affleck's fellow pilot, in Pearl Harbor.

It's a meaty part because after Affleck's character is posted missing in action, it's Danny who comforts his girlfriend, a nurse played by Kate Beckinsale. Before long, he's doing a little more than just consoling her and it's then that Affleck resurfaces. More than anything, the film is pitched as a love story that just happens to be set during a war.

But as you'd expect from the team responsible for Armageddon and The Rock, Pearl Harbor is not a small film. On the contrary, it's rumoured to have the largest official budget in Hollywood history, and as the film sweeps across America, with a brief detour to Blighty for the Battle of Britain, before climaxing with the re-creation of the Japanese Navy's devastating surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941, it tips its hat to previous epics such as Titanic and even Dr Zhivago.

In fact, so vast was the scale of the film that Hartnett seems to have initially been unwilling to appear in it. "I thought the script was good and the people involved were very passionate about it but I didn't want to be famous. I'm still kind of afraid, but my dad said something very interesting to me. He said: 'Regret can be temporary or regret can be permanent. Do what you want to do but remember that.'" Having Confucius for your old man must be handy, but why exactly was Hartnett so afraid of fame? "Well, I didn't want to do movies really, I wanted to do theatre," he claims. "Then I thought, 'If I do decent movies will that be so bad? Will I be compromising my integrity? Why not just go ahead and have a good time?'" Why not indeed. But he's clearly a young man who thinks about the more profound issues in life. He even got himself thrown out of the State University of New York at Purchase on a point of principle, after questioning the way the drama department routinely culled their students to keep down numbers. "I said something and of course they said, 'Fine, you don't have to come back.'" Not that it seems to have hindered his subsequent career. Soon after moving to LA in early 1997, he was cast as Fitz's son in the short-lived US version of Cracker. He moved swiftly on to film roles, but it wasn't until his spacey portrayal of the gloriously named Trip Fontaine in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides that he got a part substantial enough to be noticed outside of the world of teen flicks.

Pearl Harbor is very different from anything he's done before, a wartime epic that revisits a sensitive part of American history, and Hartnett prepared accordingly. "I met a bunch of people who were aces and pilots in the war, and I met some survivors of Pearl Harbor. I read a few books, but you can only learn so much from facts. When you're talking to someone who was there, you can look at their faces and that reveals so much more than words. It gives you an idea of how frightening it was."

Shooting the film at the actual Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii also helped to invest his performance with some verisimilitude. "We had planes, boats and Jeeps, and we were in costume so, if you didn't look at where the camera was, it could have been 1941," he points out. "I didn't have to do a whole lot of acting. It was just, 'Here I am in 1941 and now there are things exploding all around me, what do I do? Do I run towards them or away?' It's not a very tough decision."

Also on hand to help out was co-star Ben Affleck, who Hartnett seems to have adopted as a role model. "He's older than me and for a guy who's been through this whole juggernaut, he doesn't have any bodyguards. We'd go out to these dive bars in Honolulu and people would say, 'You're Ben Affleck,' and he'd be like, 'Yeah, how you doing? Nice to meet you.' I'd like to be like him if this stuff hits, or when this stuff hits. If I can just continue to be a good guy," he says wistfully.

The assumption that Pearl Harbor will be a massive hit is shared by everyone connected with the film, and it's probably correct, as neither Bay nor Bruckheimer are in the business of making flops. Certainly, Ridley Scott seems to believe that Hartnett has a big future because he cast him as the lead in his latest project Black Hawk Down, based on the true story of a 1993 ambush of US soldiers serving as UN peacekeepers in Somalia. Typically, Hartnett is anxious to see it in a wider context than just another action movie. "I felt the story of Americans trying to be the policemen of the world was interesting. We have to take into consideration that there are other intelligent people out there. We can be very arrogant sometimes," he says. "Beyond that, I just wanted to work with Ridley Scott. I don't have a career trajectory I'm trying to follow -I just do what's interesting at the time."

If that sounds a little disingenuous, then it's consistent with his route into acting."I busted my knee playing football and I didn't have anything else to do, so my aunt said, 'Why don't you try theatre?' because my cousin was doing it. I didn't want to, you know, 'Theatre's for cissies', but she finally coerced me into going to this audition and I ended up appearing in a bunch of plays in Minneapolis. Because of that I really got into it and I went to theatre school. When I got kicked out I thought, 'I might as well give it a shot out here'."

He claims to steer clear of the Hollywood high life and certainly strives to present a low-key image. "I've got a few actor friends but my best friends are back in Minneapolis." Don't they treat him differently now that he's on the verge of stardom? "They're all doing different things, too, so they got over that initial reaction really quickly. They don't give me a hard time." What do they hassle him about? "When I step out of line or say the wrong thing. You know, friends give you shit."

More disconcerting for Hartnett is the fact that his love life now makes the news. He's already been linked with another rising star, Julia Stiles, but says he's single, sort of. "I'm as single as anybody is I suppose. You're always looking," he muses. "I've always done OK but I'm wary of people who like me now, as opposed to, say, my ex-girlfriend who I went out with for a long time and care about deeply. Hopefully, I won't end up in some doomed Hollywood relationship. It's sad being in it and sad that everybody knows about it."

There's a feeling with Hartnett that he's almost trying too hard to seem unaffected. That might be sensible because his recent appearance in the British film Blow Dry won't have casting agents rushing to approach him to do an English accent again anytime soon. And the upcoming Forty Days and Forty Nights, in which he plays a man who gives up sex for Lent, sounds equally unpromising.

In any case, he's already making plans beyond performing because, like every other name actor in LA, he's formed his own production company, Roulette. "Me and a friend are writing a script right now. He's a brilliant writer, and if it turns out as good as I think it will, then I'll tryand find a director for it. I'm not arrogant enough to say I think I could direct yet."

Instead, he wants to move to New York and carry on doing the job he takes so seriously. "I just get stuck inside my head when I'm working with the character and making it come across," says Hartnett. "I try to find a way to convince people that what I'm doing is right. You know, there's a lot more to acting than just standing in front of the camera." Pearl Harbor is released next Friday

Illustrations/Photos:
Caption: Star-crossed lovers: Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale in
Pearl Harbor, left |Portrait by richard mclaren

(Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd, 2001)