Josh Hartnett in Fight or Flight.Csaba Aknay/Supplied
Josh Hartnett must choose his battles carefully.
Since moving to rural Hampshire, where the actor lives with his wife, Tamsin Egerton, and their four young children (plus several chickens, guinea pigs and pygmy goats), Hartnett is bound by the rules of his U.K. marriage visa, which allows him to only be out of the country for 180 days a year. Roughly, this translates to enough time to shoot one, maybe two movies abroad.
“My wife is always concerned that I might go over my time,” Harnett says with a laugh.
It feels safe to say, though, that Hartnett has used that time wisely.
After spending most of the 2010s bouncing around largely forgettable genre flicks, the 2020s ushered in what some might call either a Hartnett-aissance or Josh-ossaince (the actor doesn‘t seem to have a preferred portmanteau).
In 2023, the actor reminded audiences who might have written him off as a mere teen heartthrob (The Faculty, Pearl Harbor) just what he can do when given a meaty role by a top-tier director, stealing several scenes of Oppenheimer out from under star Cillian Murphy. At the same time, Hartnett captured the small-screen zeitgeist with his starring turn in the twisty Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea” on Netflix. Combine those turns with a knowingly wink-wink role as a movie star gone to seed in Guy Ritchie’s action-comedy Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre and a starring role as an extremely unconventional father figure in M. Night Shyamalan‘s Trap, and Hartnett was suddenly everywhere, all at once.
This weekend, though, the strength of the Hartnett-aissance faces a big test as the actor leads his first high-profile(ish) action movie since 2007’s 30 Days of Night. In the new thriller Fight or Flight, Hartnett goes full John Wick as a washed-up mercenary who finds himself aboard a Bangkok-to-San Francisco plane filled with a murderers’ row of for-hire killers.
In the new thriller Fight of Flight, Hartnett goes full John Wick.Balázs Glódi / Asbury Park Productions/Supplied
What follows is two hours of close-quarter chaos – some of it believably brutal, most of it requiring gobs of CG viscera to account for the bodily impact of, say, flying chainsaws. But the cartoonish carnage was all the more challenging given that first-time director James Madigan didn‘t have Wick-level resources, with only 25 days to shoot in Budapest (which uneasily doubles for both Bangkok and San Fran).
“It‘s a challenge, but also a recipe for ingenuity. Because it was a smaller budget, we were allowed to just go for it,” recalls the 46-year-old Hartnett. “When you put a lot of money into something, there are a lot of expectations, which can stifle creativity. But we had a fantastic group of stunt guys and girls, and we took a leap of faith.”
While Hartnett hadn‘t flexed his stunt muscles in some time, he was surrounded by experts in extremes, including cinematographer Matthew Flannery (The Raid), Canadian stunt co-ordinator Alain Moussi (the Kickboxer films), and such co-stars as Marko Zaror, a prolific on-screen bruiser who’s spent the past two decades ruling the low-budget action game (Savage Dog, Machete Kills).
“Each trainer was trying to figure out what my aptitude was and how we could use whatever skills I already had at my disposal – and it turned out to be not so much,” Hartnett says. “I had boxed a lot when I was younger, but I was 45 when we shot this, and I hadn‘t made an action movie since I was 28. We had to start from scratch.”
Hartnett wasn‘t so much attracted to Fight or Flight for the damage it could do to his body, but the opportunity it provided to play the clown, albeit a killer one.
“The tone of it sinks or swims on the comedy. If it‘s not funny, if it‘s not absurd, if it doesn‘t take you to a place that you’re not expecting, then it doesn‘t work. But we knew this was an opportunity to make something really bizarre, with a unique flavour,” says the actor, perhaps referencing the aforementioned chainsaw, or the moment in which his character slices apart an assassin in the midst of a hallucinatory haze.
That said, Hartnett didn‘t walk away from the production unscathed, notching enough bruises to earn the respect of his far more experienced collaborators.
“I felt it every day, but then I kept going back. Although, we had this amazing masseuse who was on the Hungarian Olympic water polo team – he had the strongest hands of any human being on the planet. Every time I’d get a crick in my neck, he’d just move it to the left and it‘d be, ‘Oh, relief!’” Hartnett says. “Huh, maybe the long-term effects of that might not be great.”
The long-term effects of Fight or Flight, though, are anyone’s guess – the film is opening in limited markets this weekend in between Marvel’s latest outing, Thunderbolts*, and the next Mission: Impossible sequel. Instead, the movie seems destined to become a streamer success – the kind of gnarly, come-from-nowhere B-flick that steadily creeps its way up your Netflix queue.
Not that Hartnett is waiting around to count the receipts – he already has his next 180 days spoken for, having just wrapped an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s romantic thriller Verity alongside Anne Hathaway, and another project set to shoot next month.
Perhaps after, though, he’ll make his way back to Canada, which has become something of a home base for the American actor over the past few years. Not only did he spend time in Montreal filming the 2021 journalism thriller Target Number One (in which he plays an honest-to-goodness Globe and Mail reporter), but he spent a good chunk of 2023 in Toronto, where Trap‘s Shyamalan disguised the Rogers Centre as Philadelphia‘s fictional “Tanaka Arena.” It was also a full circle moment for Hartnett, given that his third-ever film, Sofia Coppola‘s 1999 drama The Virgin Suicides, was also shot in the city.
“I’d shoot in Toronto again in a heartbeat. You know, Night and I became really good friends on Trap, and we’ve been talking about doing something else together, and he loved Toronto, so …” Hartnett muses, before trailing off. After all, the man needs to be picky.
