Josh Hartnett is leaning hard into horror for his comeback.
The “Black Hawk Down” actor, 46, has resurfaced in a cluster of dark, genre-driven projects — Netflix’s sea monster series “Below,” M. Night Shyamalan’s serial killer thriller “Trap,” and the domestic unease of “Verity” — that have fueled what fans have dubbed the “Hartnett-aissance.” That second act arrives as horror itself enjoys a mainstream moment few predicted.
Hartnett’s immersion in spooky material is no accident, though he insists the genre’s trappings aren’t what hook him. “It’s funny, it’s never the horror element that really draws me to these projects,” he told Men’s Health in an Oct. 7 story. “It’s always that I think horror is a really great genre for directors to experiment in. It feels like you can get away with more.”
That creative freedom stands in sharp contrast to the constraints Hartnett felt during his first brush with fame. Rising in the late ’90s and early 2000s through “Pearl Harbor” and “40 Days and 40 Nights,” he became a magazine-cover fixture and paparazzi target before deliberately stepping back. “I was on the cover a lot of magazines, and I had a lot of paparazzi chasing me and was just sort of kind of thrown into the center of that world,” he recalled during an Oct. 2 interview. “I didn’t want to feel like I wasn’t in any control of my own life.”
The “Sin City” actor retreated to his native Minnesota, then later settled in England with “Camelot” actress Tamsin Egerton, 37, whom he married quietly in 2021. The couple share four children. “I needed to step away from the limelight,” he said. “I hadn’t defined myself yet…there were lots of people that were kind of putting their definition of me out there into the world, and that was affecting my own idea of who I am.”
Hartnett added that he never stopped working — just chose projects beneath the radar. His return to visibility began gradually with the Victorian horror series “Penny Dreadful” from 2014 to 2016, where he played a gunslinger werewolf, and continued with 2025 turns in “The Bear” and “Oppenheimer” that proved he could operate outside genre entirely.
The current horror boom gives his comeback fertile ground. Last year brought Oscar attention to “Sinners,” “Weapons,” and “Frankenstein” — rare awards recognition for a field the ceremony typically snubs. This year, Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil” dominated box offices alongside surprise hits “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” the latter pair minting new stars in Inde Navarrette and young filmmakers Kane Parsons and Curry Barker.
Prolific horror creator Mike Flanagan recently said, “It makes me happy that horror has these cycles. It has these moments.” The “Carrie” creator noted that “the genre is eternal,” but acknowledged, “We are in a particularly interesting moment right now, because I think we saw last year this incredible upswell in event horror.”
In “Below,” Hartnett stars as a grizzled fisherman sporting an accent that has already drawn notice, while “Verity” — adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novel and co-starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson — hovers at horror’s edge as a thriller of mounting tension and dark behavior. He had sampled horror earlier with 2007’s “30 Days of Night,” but heartthrob and heroic roles dominated his early career; he famously turned down Superman twice.
The attention that followed his initial rise proved too much. He said in July 2024 that his first round of stardom was a “weird time” because “people’s attention to me at the time was borderline unhealthy… People showed up at my house.” That same year, he told Interview magazine, “The choice to step back from the industry had more to do with just plain sanity.” Hartnett noted, “On top of that, I felt like the celebrity culture was really vacuous…I wasn’t interested in any of that.”
His retreat aimed at “a much less Hollywood existence,” as he put it — one that let him reclaim his self-image from public definition. Now, with horror ascendant and his own terms reset, the “Virgin Suicides” actor has found a lane where directors push boundaries and his presence carries renewed weight.
Hartnett’s “Below” premiered on Netflix as part of the streamer’s current programming slate.
