Pearl Harbor heart-throb Josh Hartnett may be on every casting director’s wish list, but he’s keeping his distance from Tinseltown. His latest project, O, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello set in a posh Southern prep school, opens across the US on Friday and though the reluctant Minnesota hunk is game to make the publicity rounds, don’t expect him to put on airs.
“I’m not going to ditch my family and friends,” says Josh, re his house-hunting in his snowy home state rather than in sunny Los Angeles. “Also, when you get done with a movie, the last thing you want to do is go back to a movie-saturated city where you work all the time.”
Josh moved to New York “to paint” in the late Nineties but fell into acting. Soon he was starring in the umpteenth sequel to the Halloween franchise and while a steady stream of roles followed, he operated largely under the radar before Pearl Harbor hit. Suddenly the 23-year-old’s face was everywhere, including on a much-talked about Vanity Fair cover. But though the Michael Bay picture earned $195 million in the US alone, making it the third top-grossing film of the summer, reviews were not kind.
“When you have that kind of press beforehand, when people actually see the movie, they are bound to want to rip it apart,” he says.
The WWII movie may have bombed with critics, but O has received solid reviews and looks likely to raise the star’s profile even higher, though perhaps not with his female fans. “I don’t think a lot of people will like Hugo,” Josh says of the scheming character he plays in the politically charged teen drama. “Now instead of getting love letters from girls, I’ll get hate mail.”
The eagerly anticipated O almost never made it into cinemas. The film was completed over two years ago and was scheduled for release in 1999. However, following the Columbine High School massacre the violence-laden picture was put on hold.
“I almost lost my faith and my hope that a serious film about teen violence would be acceptable to American audiences,” says O director Tim Blake Nelson.
But now, with some distance between the tragedy and the film, Disney-owned Miramax has sold the film’s rights to Lion’s Gate and O will finally see the light of day. The film opens in the US this week before hitting UK cinemas later this year.
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
