How Josh Hartnett became the best A-lister to turn his back on Hollywood
msn.comJosh Hartnett in Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut The Virgin Suicides, he is lit like an old-school movie star. “Eight months before the suicides,” explains a voiceover, “he’d emerged from baby fat to the delight of girls and mothers alike. ” In her cult 1999 film, Coppola frames Hartnett strutting down a school hallway with Seventies pin-up hair before receiving brownies and completed homework from would-be female suitors.
His eyelashes seem painted on. Coppola’s vision of the then-19-year-old felt like a premonition, and Hartnett graduated from the film an A-lister in waiting.
Or at least, that was the plan. Instead, what followed was one of the most interesting cases of Y2K star-making gone awry. This week, Hartnett heads up The Fear Index, a new Sky Atlantic series in which he plays a computer scientist plunged into a dangerous cyberconspiracy after developing an AI that can manipulate the stock market.
Think of it as The 39 Steps with iPhones and jittery camera work. It’s his most recent European project – he lives in Surrey with his actor wife Tamsin Egerton and their two children – in a lengthy run of them, including horror series Penny Dreadful and Guy Ritchie action movie Wrath of Man.
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