On track for megastardom, the actor turned down the part of Superman (twice) and turned his back on Hollywood. Now living in rural Hampshire, he talks about choosing fulfilling projects, his hippie childhood, the perils of stalkers – and the fun of owning pygmy goats
Every morning, as soon as the actor Josh Hartnett wakes up in his home in the Hampshire countryside, there are mouths to be fed. Most obviously, those of his four young children. But also: the dog, several guinea pigs, several more chickens and a small herd of pygmy goats. The goats, Hartnett notes, are his favourites.
“They’re the sweetest animals on the planet,” he says, over Zoom, from his home. “They’re like dogs. They would live in the house if they could. In fact, I’ve seen people having their goats in the house with diapers on, but we felt that was kinda cruel.”
Hartnett and his wife, the British actor Tamsin Egerton, spent lockdown here. For years they’d been living a ping-pong existence between the UK and the US. When their third child was on the way, they decided to stay in Hampshire, and Hartnett has become a fixture in local village life ever since.
Unlike when he’s in New York or LA, “where people only want to talk about your career,” he says, here “nobody cares”, which is just how he likes it. He’s in the UK on a marriage visa, which means he can only be out of the country for work 180 days a year, or roughly one movie, which also suits him fine. At night, after the kids have been put to bed, he sometimes finds time to paint – his first love. But mostly, he says, this existence allows him to experience his children growing up in a way he otherwise wouldn’t.
“This is all brand new to me,” he says. “I never would have expected it. And time passes quickly. With four children, you have so much to do. In a way, less is happening. But more of the important stuff is happening. My oldest daughter is eight and a half now – that feels like it happened in the last two years to me. So I’m trying to soak up as much as possible.”
Hartnett’s Hollywood trajectory was a fairly common one. Interesting early indie roles saw his stock rise – Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty in 1998, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides a year later. Those parts catapulted him into big-time roles that required little more of him than to look lovelorn (40 Days and 40 Nights, where his character gives up sex for Lent), heroic (Black Hawk Down, which was thrilling but thin), or heroic and lovelorn at the same time (the deeply terrible Pearl Harbor).
But Hartnett didn’t much like the attention that came with the big gigs. And before long he did the most unforgivable thing any would-be megastar could: he decided he didn’t want to be one. He left LA, moved back to his hometown of Minnesota and parted company with his agents. Tabloids still bring up Hartnett’s disappearance – “What happened to Josh Hartnett?” Screen Rant asked recently – though it’s been almost two decades since he made the switch.
In reality, Hartnett only stopped working for 18 months. But from then on he declined the bland heart-throb roles for which he was often suggested and instead pushed for more challenging, smaller projects. (He notably turned down the role of Superman twice.) “I just didn’t want my life to be swallowed up by my work,” he says now. “And there was a notion at that time you just kind of give it all up. And you saw what happened to some people back then. They got obliterated by it. I didn’t want that for myself.”
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