Josh Hartnett Quietly Became One of the Best Actors Working — Here's How

By CreativeQuizzes Editorial Team

The heartthrob who chose to disappear

Josh Hartnett's new Netflix series, Below, premieres October 8, and it's arriving at a strange, satisfying moment in a career that most people assumed had already peaked and faded twenty years ago. In the early 2000s, Hartnett was one of the biggest young stars in Hollywood, headlining Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down while still in his early twenties. Then he mostly walked away from that version of fame, on purpose, and spent nearly two decades rebuilding himself into a very different kind of actor.

That's not the usual career arc. Most stars who get that big that young either stay there or struggle to find footing again once the industry moves on. Hartnett did neither — he deliberately stepped back from leading-man roles that didn't interest him, and the payoff has been a genuinely unusual second act built on exactly the kind of morally complicated, less flattering characters that a 24-year-old action hero rarely gets offered.

Turning down the role that would have changed everything

Hartnett was approached multiple times in the early 2000s to play Batman, and turned it down each time. "It just wasn't the kind of movie I wanted to do," he's said of the decision — a choice that looks almost unthinkable given how that franchise reshaped the careers of the actors who did take it on.

It wasn't an isolated instance of caution, either. Through the 2000s and 2010s, Hartnett kept working steadily but largely out of the spotlight, taking roles that interested him rather than chasing the biggest possible platform — a strategy that cost him a certain kind of fame but bought him the freedom to keep choosing his own path.

The comeback nobody quite predicted

The turn came in 2023, when Christopher Nolan cast him as physicist Ernest Lawrence in Oppenheimer — a supporting role in one of the decade's most acclaimed films, and a reminder to audiences that Hartnett had never actually left. He followed it with a genuinely unsettling lead performance as a serial killer hiding in plain sight in M. Night Shyamalan's Trap (2024), a role that leaned directly into the kind of moral ambiguity he's said he's drawn to. "I like characters that have a complexity of motivations," Hartnett has explained, "not necessarily straight heroic characters, but characters with shades of grey."

That same instinct carried into 2026's Verity, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel, where Hartnett plays Jeremy Crawford, a husband caring for his bedridden, secret-hiding author wife — another role built on things not being quite what they seem on the surface.

Below brings him to Newfoundland, and to executive producing

His new project takes the pattern somewhere new. In Below, a six-episode Netflix thriller premiering October 8 after debuting at TIFF earlier this month, Hartnett plays Calvin Penney, a stubborn Newfoundland fisherman still haunted by his father's unexplained death decades earlier, who has to hold his small coastal community together when a mysterious sea creature starts terrorizing the town.

It's Hartnett's first time serving as an executive producer on a television series, alongside a creative team that includes Jessica Rhoades (Black Mirror, Station Eleven) and showrunner Jesse McKeown. Hartnett has said he was drawn to Newfoundland itself as much as the script — the show blends local folklore, suspense, and family drama in a way he's described as genuinely distinct from anything else currently airing.

Why the long way around worked

Looking back at the arc now, Hartnett's own read on it holds up: "If anybody is looking back at my career, I hope they see that I was always trying to push the boundaries of my own abilities and understanding." That's a rare thing to be able to say honestly about a career that includes both a Pearl Harbor-sized peak of tabloid fame and a genuinely strange villain turn in an M. Night Shyamalan thriller two decades later.

With Below adding a producing credit to an already unusual run — Oppenheimer, Trap, Verity, guest spots on Black Mirror and The Bear — Hartnett has quietly built the kind of resume that's much harder to plan than a steady decade of blockbuster leads. He walked away from being famous in one specific way so he could become interesting in a completely different one.