Josh Hartnett Reveals Scary Stalker Incidents Pushed Him To Leave Hollywood
Josh Hartnett is full-on back, y’all.
We were so glad to see him looking older and wiser — but still a snack — in a couple supporting turns last year, including Best Picture winner Oppenheimer. And the late ’90s, early 2000s heartthrob is back in the lead with M. Night Shyamalan‘s new thriller Trap this weekend.
For a while Josh was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet before kind of… well, disappearing a bit for a few years. For about a decade he only did that Penny Dreadful show and then a couple tiny indies. He’s talked before about how he felt leaving Hollywood was the right choice, telling Australia’s Sunrise a couple years ago it turned out to be “the best thing from my mental health and my career.” But he hasn’t spoken much about why he left. He told them the business was “overwhelming for a 21-year-old kid” and that he felt “harassed” by all the attention. What he didn’t say was how bad that got.
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In a new interview with the UK’s The Guardian, he gives a more in-depth answer. He got so famous, he was so loved, that it got scary. Like stalker scary.
“People’s attention to me at the time was borderline unhealthy. There were incidents. People showed up at my house. People that were stalking me.”
Whoa! That has got to be terrifying for someone who isn’t prepared. And as he’s mentioned before, he was quite young when he got famous, instantly developing a following after making a splash in his back-to-back-to-back first movies, Halloween H20, The Faculty, and The Virgin Suicides. It was too much when stalkers got close. He recalled one such incident:
“A guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison.”
Yeesh! That wasn’t all, but it definitely feels like the closest he came to getting well… Look, it’s not like no star has ever been killed by an unbalanced fan. Josh decided that wasn’t the life he wanted:
“There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.”
Speaking once again about why he famously turned down the huge roles of Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman — any one of which would have raised his profile even more — he explained:
“I just didn’t want my life to be swallowed up by my work. 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.”
But deciding not to do Batman meant not working with filmmaker Christopher Nolan, something the artist in him really wanted to do — hence coming back for Oppenheimer last year:
“I recognize the missed opportunity to work with a guy like Chris. And I’ve figured out that as much as you’re worried about curating your career to things you’re interested in, I don’t believe that’s the most important thing any more. It’s about finding people who you really trust.”
And now that he’s old her feels more comfortable with it all. And we’re just glad to have him back on our screens!
[Image via Patti Ouderkirk/WENN/Warner Bros/YouTube.]
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