14 DAY TRIAL // One year ago, as he was promoting a new season of Showtime’s “Penny Dreadful,” Josh Hartnett, once one of Hollywood’s hottest commodities, revealed that he had turned down offers to play Batman, Spider-Man, and even Superman. He was too afraid to become typecast, he explained.
He may have avoided that by turning down these roles, but that doesn’t mean he’s not sorry. Looking back, saying no to Christopher Nolan when they met to talk about Batman was Hartnett’s biggest mistake, the actor tells Playboy in a new interview.
“I’ve definitely said no to some of the wrong people”
Hartnett was always a very reluctant star / heartthrob, even back in the day when movie studios would fight to get him on their projects. This stemmed from his desire to be taken seriously for his work and to avoid typecasting, which was a huge risk for him because of his good looks - and the way the media and the fans would focus on them.
Playing a superhero at the time was for him the surest way to becoming typecast. Obviously, he had no idea the superhero genre would blow up the way it did, let alone that Nolan would come along and reinvent the superhero narrative on the big screen by infusing it with realism and grit.
So yes, in retrospect, Josh is very sorry he didn’t agree to do his Batman. Christian Bale eventually landed the part.
“I’ve definitely said no to some of the wrong people,” Hartnett explains. “People don’t like being told no. I learned my lesson when [writer-director] Christopher Nolan and I talked about Batman. I decided it wasn’t for me. Then [Nolan] didn’t want to put me in The Prestige. That’s when I realized relationships were formed in the fire of that first Batman film and I should have been part of the relationship with this guy Nolan, who I felt was incredibly cool and very talented.”
He continues to say that seeing Christian Bale move from Batman to bigger and even better received projects (and an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) still stings: that could have been him.
Nolan is a creature of habit
It might sound like Hartnett is being mean when he says that Noland “didn’t want to put” him in “The Prestige” after he turned down the offer to appear in “Batman Begins,” but he’s telling the truth: the director is nothing if not a creature of habit.
In recent years, it’s become very clear that he’s very loyal to the actors he casts in his movies, in the sense that he tends to go back to them when he has a new project coming up. Think Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or Anne Hathaway.
Had Hartnett agreed to do Batman, he would have also appeared in “The Prestige” next. Even assuming he would have done half the job Bale did in the “Dark Knight” trilogy, the exposure alone would have provided him with a much wider range of choices for his next projects, so he could have made sure to pick those that would have prevented him from becoming typecast.
This is the upside of doing a big-budget superhero / action movie, aside from the money: even if it’s of inferior quality (which was not the case with Nolan’s trilogy, by the way), it opens new doors and paves the way to more varied work, including artsy stuff.
Josh Hartnett has every reason to feel sorry.