The Josh Harnett-aissance continues with wild movie 'Fight or Flight'

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When Josh Hartnett embarked on his path to stardom nearly 30 years ago, he began his journey with a promise to himself. Fresh-faced and just out of school, the then 18-year-old gave himself two months.

Recently transplanted from New York to Los Angeles, Hartnett, now 46, gave himself two months to find work as an actor.

“Someone asked me if I wanted to audition for a couple of things. They invited me out to L.A. and they said they had an agent for me and I was like, ‘Who are you? This sounds creepy,'” the actor says over Zoom during an interview promoting Fight or Flight, his new action movie now playing in theatres. “But I took them up on their offer. I gave myself two months. I said, ‘Two months, and if it doesn’t work, I’m going to move back to New York.’ And I got really lucky. I didn’t know how lucky I’d got.”

Right out of the gate, the SAG Award winner acted opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi horror The Faculty in 1998.

“I landed a couple of roles and it changed my life,” he says thoughtfully. Two months doesn’t seem like a long enough period of time to figure out if something will work, but looking back on it, Hartnett says he knew that was all he would need.

“Two months seemed like a long enough time for me. I was 18 years old,” he says, laughing.

Hartnett followed up those films with appearances in The Virgin Suicides, O, Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down.

In the mid-2000s, he started flipping between studio films (Hollywood Homicide, Sin City, 30 Days of Night) and independent movies (August, Wild Horses). Hartnett knew that if he wanted to have sticking power as an actor, one that went beyond his initial heartthrob status, he would need to build a resume that showed he wasn’t afraid to take risks.

“It was my life,” he says looking back on his lengthy career. “I didn’t know what it was yet, and it’s still evolving … I didn’t have an idea of what my life and career would look like. It was all just circumstance.”

After booking roles in Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, three seasons of Penny Dreadful, recent episodes of Black Mirror and The Bear, and last year’s Trap, in which he played a scene-stealing serial killer, the Josh Hartnett-aissance (as it’s been dubbed by his fans) is soaring to new heights with Fight or Flight. The bonkers action extravaganza casts the actor as a disgraced government agent who is recruited for a dangerous mission on a plane filled with assassins hired to kill him.

As the Hawaiian shirt-wearing Lucas Reyes, Hartnett is tapped by his former boss, and ex-lover (Katee Sackhoff), to track down a mysterious cyber-terrorist known only as the Ghost onboard a flight bound to San Francisco from Thailand. It’s an easy enough gig, until Reyes realizes that his seatmates up and down the plane are hired killers looking to take both of them out.

“I’m just a lucky guy,” Hartnett says of the scripts that have been coming across his desk. “It’s been a whirlwind of super high-calibre people that have sent me interesting things over the last few years, and I just feel really grateful that I’ve been able to play all these different types of characters.”

The John Wick-style action that punctuates the film is a throwback to the types of movies he watched growing up.

“It reminds me of a movie that we would have seen in the ’90s,” he says. “It’s all in camera. The stunts are done by the people you see on the screen; I did mine, (co-star) Charithra Chandran did hers. It’s old school in that way, but that adds to the pleasure of watching it.”

Performing his own stunts wasn’t easy. Hartnett says the last time he took on such a physically demanding role was more than 15 years ago when he starred in the 2010 martial-arts film Bunraku.

“I was 29 when I did that, and I did this when I was 44. That’s a big difference,” he says.

Further complicating things was the fact that he and first-time director James Madigan were working with a shoestring budget. One false bit of choreography and an entire fight sequence could be ruined.

“Because it was my first action movie in a very long time, (the studio) didn’t know if I could pull it off, so they were only willing to bet so much on us,” Hartnett says laughing. “We had no budget for reshoots. So we got what we got on the day.”

To plug the film, Hartnett, who lives with his wife, actress Tamsin Egerton, and their four children in Hampshire, England, has even embraced social media for several posts on the official Instagram account for the movie.

“I still don’t have social media,” he quips, joking that he’s already planning on “ghosting” the app when he’s done this latest publicity tour.

With last year’s Trap finding a new life on streaming, Hartnett is also having fun fielding questions about that movie and it’s ambiguous ending.

Was it connected to M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable universe as some Redditors have theorized?

“You’d have to talk to Night about that,” Hartnett says, grinning. “He wouldn’t even tell me.”

But he’s enjoying seeing the thriller find renewed success with audiences at home.

“I know that people have been very excited about it recently and getting into it a lot more,” he says. “I love Trap and Night is one of the most unique filmmakers working today. People didn’t give it enough credit when it was out, but that’s a theme with Night. I think when you go back and revisit his work, you’ll see it’s phenomenal work. That movie and that character was so fun to play and unique for me. I’m proud that people have theories about it and are thinking deeply about it because that’s cool. That’s what audience interaction is about, right?”

Looking back on it, Hartnett realizes that things may have come easily for him at first all those years ago when he took a gamble and headed to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting.

“Some people I know worked long and hard to get to that point where they have an opportunity,” he says. “I’m not trying to belittle that time, it’s just I had a completely different trajectory. I didn’t have an idea of what my life and career would look like. It was all just circumstance … But it’s gratifying.”

Fight or Flight is now playing in theatres.

mdaniell@postmedia.com