How Josh Hartnett became the best A-lister to turn his back on Hollywood

Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy When we first see Josh 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. Hartnett – like Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Ewan McGregor before him – was a Weinstein movie star, thrown into films he didn’t want to do by the disgraced producer. Next month he’s in Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune, an action comedy that casts Hartnett as the kind of person the film industry always insisted he was: the biggest movie star in the world.