Josh Hartnett on Hollywood idiots and how Hugh Grant messed with his head on Operation Fortune
Josh Hartnett says his vain, pampered Hollywood star in Operation Fortune is inspired by real people, and reveals how Hugh Grant ‘hazed’ him in their scenes together.
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Josh Hartnett says he jumped at the chance to play an entitled, pampered, none-too-bright Hollywood megastar in Guy Ritchie’s new spy-thriller Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre.
After more than 25 years in the business, he says he’s seen more than a few who fit that description and while his comedic creation of Danny Francesco – the vain, A-list heart-throb who becomes entangled in an international espionage caper – is not based on any particular person, there are definitely elements of truth in there.
“It’s an over-the-top version of stories that we’ve all heard about actors,” says Hartnett slightly blearily over Zoom call from the London home he shares with British actor Tamsin Edgerton and their three children, one of whom got him up at 3am that morning. “And I welcomed the opportunity to make fun of my industry and to make fun of myself as much as possible.
“There are bits and pieces of a few people in there but I didn’t do an impersonation of any one actor. That wouldn’t be fair – it wouldn’t be nice. Some of these stories were things that Guy came in with originally, and some more things that I brought. It’s no one in particular, but some of these stories are based on reality.
“It was fun to visit that world and have no skin in the game and to be able to play with it and not actually be trapped in it. I’ve seen an enormous amount of bad behaviour in our business and it’s not hard to lampoon.”
There was a time that Hartnett was at the centre of the Hollywood maelstrom himself, and was one of the hottest movie stars on the planet in the early 2000s thanks to roles in Ridley Scott’s war hit Black Hawk Down, Michael Bay’s overblown Pearl Harbor and rom-com 40 Days and 40 Nights.
He famously turned down the part of Superman several times and eventually took a step back from fame and the spotlight, describing the grind of trying to stay at the top of the acting tree as a “shortcut to unhappiness”. Hartnett took a break from acting and, when he returned, it was for the kind of projects that he wanted to do rather than the ones expected of him or designed to keep his face on the front of magazines.
He’s been asked about his retreat from the limelight ever since and the only time the affable American gets slightly tetchy is when asked whether his Operation Fortune role brought back some Hollywood memories he’d rather forget.
“It doesn’t feel like a revisitation,” he says. “I mean, I’ve said so much about the choices I made as a teen and 20-something I feel like it’s been kind of exhausted. I’ve continued to make, I think, really interesting films over the course of the last 25 years and I am just so lucky to be able to continue to do that.
“I’m in such a different point in my life right now. And I’m working with some of the best directors in Hollywood and hopefully creating some really cool standout characters now. I have no regrets. I don’t look back that often. I’ve got a family that I love and I’m very lucky. “I always focus forward and I’m always kind of surprised in these interviews, how much people want to go back to the same stories about when I was much younger. It’s been a long time and I’m still working with some great people and I like where I’m at.”
Hartnett says that Ritchie is one of those great people and he signed on to Operation Fortune before he’d even seen a script or knew the story.
“He’s a brilliant filmmaker,” Hartnett says. “I’ve never worked with anyone like him. I think people love working with him because he consistently makes cool, interesting films. And they’re cool – that’s the operative word.”
The pair had worked together previously on Ritchie’s 2021 heist movie Wrath Of Man, which, like Operation Fortune, starred the director’s frequent collaborator and leading man Jason Statham. Hartnett’s character in that film was at that point “basically a name and the butt of a couple of jokes” and had no dialogue, but seeing he’d been a Ritchie fan since his early films Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, figured he’d go along for the ride anyway.
“Guy called me just before Christmas and said ‘I’m shooting a movie, I know you’re in England – would you want to be in it? There’s nothing for you’,” recalls Hartnett with a laugh. “And I said, ‘Well, that sounds like a terrible offer – thanks, Guy’. And he said ‘We can work something out of the day’. And I thought that would be a lot of fun because I’ve never been able to work like that. It’s sort of improvising a character within a script that’s already there.”
Hartnett’s experience as a more peripheral character in Wrath of Man held him in good stead for Operation Fortune, which also stars The White Lotus’ Aubrey Plaza, Hugh Grant, Cary Elwes and Eddie Marsan. The globetrotting caper, in which Statham’s undercover spy team are on a mission to stop Grant’s billionaire arms dealer from selling a deadly tech weapon, was filmed almost entirely in Turkey during Covid and then delayed for a year, supposedly because its Ukrainian villains would not go down well with audiences after the Russian invasion into that country.
Most of Hartnett’s scenes were with Grant, who was already familiar with Ritchie’s penchant for improvisation thanks to his roles in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Gentlemen. While the pair had a blast off-set, regularly sharing meals together in the hotel Covid-bubble and hitting the golf course together, while the cameras rolled, the British veteran set about making the newcomer’s life as miserable as possible.
“One of the worst days I’ve ever had on set was my first day working with Hugh, who I love and I got along very well with,” Hartnett says, laughing. “He was trying everything he could to throw me off my game, because Hugh is terrible that way. Hugh is wonderful, but he’s a real jerk.”
For one scene, Ritchie wanted Hartnett’s character to improvise a funny story about being in the movie industry and come up with a different version each time, a taxing task that left the actor on the verge of collapse.
“We did, like, 30 takes and I was running out of steam and in the middle of it, Hugh was asking me questions like ‘who do you hate most in the industry?’ and getting my head spinning on actually telling stories about actual people. And it was awful. I almost passed out – no joke – and had to sit down after it. I was being hazed essentially. It worked out but it was trial by fire. Hugh Grant is one of the most charming and deceitful and horrible people I have ever met.”
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Next up for Hartnett is Christopher Nolan’s eagerly anticipated and highly secretive biopic Oppenheimer. The pair had crossed paths briefly in Hartnett’s heyday when he was being considered for the title role in Batman Begins that eventually went to Christian Bale. In a complete change of pace that befits his eclectic career, Hartnett plays Nobel-winning nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence opposite Cillian Murphy, who plays the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer.
“I can’t say anything about it,” Hartnett says. “People are constantly poking. I even had Cillian Murphy’s agent asking me about and I was like, ‘ask your client’. Nobody’s going to say anything – you’d be stupid to. But I can’t wait for people to see it – I think it will be really great.”
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is in cinemas on Thursday
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