It’s 26 years after the fact, but when I see Josh Hartnett now, I can't not think of Josh Hartnett, around 20 years old, in his final scene of only his second feature film, The Faculty, Robert Rodriguez’s sharp-tongued, fun-as-hell alien-teachers-take-over-the-school ride. Hartnett—with those big beautiful, hooded eyes, those big, beautiful eyebrows, that big, beautiful gap in his big, beautiful teeth—plays Zeke, a badly coiffed (Hartnett gave himself that haircut) but darkly sexy burnout who is actually a secret science whiz. “I’m a contradiction,” Zeke says, a trope on a trope. Which is why this last scene comes as a bit of a surprise: One month after the aliens have been expunged, this former loner reappears, filmed in slow-mo, the heavy shoulders of his football uniform (!!!) right at his ears, nonchalantly pulling out his mouthguard, and then taking a drag of his cigarette.
So, yeah, when I see Josh Hartnett now, I can’t help but think of Josh Hartnett, rebel varsity letterman. Some critics think he never got better than this, than this adolescent version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1998 that sailed the post-Scream teen horror tsunami. But it was Hollywood that never got better than this. Not when it came to him anyway.
The film starts out at your average high school, the calm broken by a very loudly revving Trans Am (or something) tearing into the parking lot, the kind of bad boy introduction that must have always played like a cliché, even back in the ‘50s, or whenever it started. Out of the car emerges Zeke’s pelvic area, because why not focus there first. His jeans are barely holding on, he’s got a handful of powder-filled Bics, which turn out to be homemade “drugs”—“Caffeine pills and some other household shit,” he will later clarify—which will play an important plot point. But you don’t really get Zeke’s big, beautiful face until the next scene, when he is in the bathroom handing out fake IDs to two guys (Danny Masterson and Wiley Wiggins, of all people). Right before that, in the hallway, the way he laughs at a viciously fighting couple as though to prove he thrives on chaos, that slight lift upon seeing a girl he will like later, the way he seems to be play-acting hard—“Guaranteed to jack you up,” he croaks as he proffers his fake drugs—there's a vulnerability to this guy that you don't see in the studied cool of, say, Christian Slater in Heathers. Something human. Maybe it’s some slippage between on screen and off, a bit of Hartnett in over his head, pretending to be at home on this huge production. Whatever it is, it softens his edge, disarms him.
There’s a great moment after Elijah Wood (BLOTR: Before Lord of the Rings), as the nerdy Casey, finds a little worm thing on the football field which turns out to be one of the aliens. He brings it to his science teacher, Jon Stewart (yes, Jon Stewart, who actually had a really promising acting career starting up back then and I don’t know why he didn’t stick to it. Jon Stewart, if you can hear me, you should try acting again!) Zeke, who has literally heard it all before (he’s repeating his senior year), sits in the back, separate from the group, throwing out easy answers to hard questions, until he’s had enough, barrels over and shoves Stewart out of the way, whose expression is a very priceless: Yeah, OK, big man. But it’s an important point.
Hartnett is 6-foot-3. By any standards, that’s a strapping size. By Hollywood standards, that’s gigantic. Later on, in that same science class, the camera will catch all the teen protagonists together around an aquarium and Zeke is a FULL HEAD above everyone else. I imagine because of this, Hartnett is often stooping in this film, his clothes draped over him—pants hanging off, arms too long. He’s like those teenagers who get too big too fast, like he doesn’t know what to do with this towering body he has been given (future castmates like Kate Beckinsale will suggest his big, beautiful face is also somewhat confounding to him). He’s a commanding presence, but despite himself, so it makes you want to move towards him rather than away.
This is why it’s particularly interesting to watch Zeke with his love interests. Obviously, he has two. One is Famke Janssen, as “mousy” teacher Miss Burke, who becomes snatched when she becomes snatched. The other is Laura Harris as the aggressively naïve transfer student, Marybeth Louise Hutchinson. Zeke is tender with both of them in different ways. With Miss Burke, he is flirtily irreverent. As she lightly scolds him for conducting business on school property, attempting to exert the authority she doesn’t have, he smiles curiously. But when he goes too far (offering her cherry-flavored condoms) and sees how upset he makes her, Zeke quietly rests his head against the trunk of the car, as though he is contemplating the full abyss of his adolescence. Later on, when Burke starts berating him after being taken over by aliens, his come hither let’s have it gesture to her hackneyed psychoanalysis is hilarious—it is true, he is a rich kid whose parents are always off in Europe somewhere—but Hartnett is careful to let a sliver of sadness bleed through as he mumbles, with a mirthless laugh: “She got some bad shit.”
With Marybeth, there’s less of a power play, so it’s all a bit sweeter. The bigger height difference (Harris is 5-foot-5, Janssen 5-foot-11) helps here. Zeke bends as he towers over Marybeth, as though he is keeping himself from being too overbearing. With her, he flits between mild cool and mild concern, his eyebrows bowing up or down depending. But there’s nothing more vulnerable than catching someone in a crush. When Zeke eventually kisses Marybeth, he barely touches her face, like he doesn't want to break her or corrupt her. Like she is to be looked after (this sounds retrograde, but it ends up being turned on its head, don’t worry). The way he questions her when she fucks up at the end, potentially ruining their chances at staying alive, not blaming her, just disappointed in the situation, also seems oddly generous. Likely this was in the direction, but still, Hartnett, despite being only 20, comes off as the kind of guy who would know not to assign blame. In this way, he seems older than everyone else.
Hartnett got The Faculty because he had no idea what he was doing. He came into the audition dropping his script, everything in the wrong order, the scene all wrong. Rodriguez interpreted that as him being cool, like he didn’t give a fuck. But this is something of a recurring theme with Hartnett, in those early years anyway, that he doesn't quite know how he comes off. He’s from Minnesota; that’s apparently the excuse people around him provided. I think of this every time Zeke absently takes off his thick glasses and flips them over his ears, so they are at the back of his head instead of on top of it—it’s such an absently nerdy-but-adult thing to do, which I am just going to assume he got from Minnesota. This is a dude in the form of a matinée idol who isn’t fully aware of it. (Sofia Coppola played off of this iconography in The Virgin Suicides in 2001, when she cast Hartnett as the puka-shelled carefree Trip Fontaine, whom she introduced like a “bad commercial” along to Heart’s “Magic Man”). The privilege of being beautiful is the freedom to be oblivious about it. But it is also a cage. Hartnett was given the central spot on The Faculty poster even though it’s Wood who has the bigger name and role. It marked the start of a burden.
“Hollywood is probably as tough a place to be as high school in a way.”
“It is high school.”
This sounds like movie dialogue, but it's an exchange between journalist Elizabeth Weitzman and Hartnett in Interview magazine in 2000. That it was the Valentine’s issue is indicative of how Josh “Hot-nett” (literal YM cover line from the period—I couldn’t stop laughing) was seen by the press but also just the industry itself. Kisses and hearts floated around this guy’s head everywhere he went. And the eyes of businessmen turned those hearts into dollar signs. Even at the time, at such a young age, Hartnett knew what was going on. In 2024, to take issue with being valued as a product rather than as a person seems quaint. But Hartnett was born in 1978. He talked about the Beats and Dostoyevsky in his interviews. He bucked against being “an asset" and “a commodity.” “People wanted to create a brand around me,” he recently told The Guardian. Of the Weinsteins, who produced The Faculty, he said, “I was a kid they felt they should invest in.” He burned bridges with studios because he refused to be a piece of property. He almost didn’t do Pearl Harbor and after Black Hawk Down he was done. As he told Mr. Porter magazine, “I decided to have a life.”
This reminds me a little of Tom Hardy, who openly dismantled his model good looks so they would stop weighing him down. Hartnett instead just lived his life, doing movies he wanted to do, but remaining relatively under the radar as he grew older. Then, last year, he suddenly turns up in Oppenheimer. And not just as anyone, but as nuclear physicist Earnest Lawrence, which is to say Hartnett was cast by Nolan to play the guy who scolds Oppenheimer, who puts him in his place (“Theory will only take you so far”). Nolan, who had met Hartnett in his younger years, must have known the actor could do this without alienating anyone. The collective critical joy at Hartnett’s appearance confirmed this. The role led to The Bear creator Christopher Storer casting him in a small part as a sheepish family man (he marries Richie’s ex). According to Men’s Health, Storer had “always been impressed with [Hartnett’s] physicality and ‘a gentleness’ that he feels comes naturally.” In Hartnett’s latest, M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, in which he stars as a serial killer masquerading as a family man, that gentleness is a little harder to come by. But in the end, when his character slips open his shackles after finally being caught, he starts laughing maniacally, and I saw a flicker of Zeke, who right before that final scene in The Faculty asks, “Is it over?” before dissolving into a fit of hysterics.
