Josh Hartnett Is in Beast Mode

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I’M TALKING ABOUT Jaws with Josh Hartnett, and there’s a name he can’t remember. “Why am I completely blanking?” he asks, visible frustration on his face. He’s searching his mind for it, wearing a dark blue button-down over a white t-shirt, with a pair of clear-framed glasses on his eyes and a couple days of stubble on his face. “Most amazing actor of all time. Not [Richard] Dreyfuss—Quint. God, why can’t I remember his name?”

I can’t remember the name either. We’re both blanking. Having something in common with an A-lister would be nice if it didn’t leave us both searching our minds and staring in silence across a Zoom screen. At this point, I almost regret comparing his character Calvin in Below to the film’s protagonist, Chief Brody.

That’s why we were talking about Jaws. Hartnett’s new Netflix series offers a sort of updated take on Steven Spielberg’s Amity Island adventure. Except it’s set (and shot) in Newfoundland, and Hartnett’s co-star is not an oversized animatronic shark, but rather a Lovecraftian sea monster brought to life mostly through the powers of suggestion (and, sure, some CGI tentacles).

When I said it felt like he was getting his Roy Scheider on, he didn’t agree. “There’s more of a salty dog sensibility about him, someone that has lived in this place for such a long time and is of the place,” he says. “Whereas Roy Scheider is, no pun intended, a fish out of water.” The character who instead came to his mind was Quint, the gruff, historied, man-with-a-plan at the center of the narrative. Suddenly, the name comes to me: Robert Shaw. Robert Shaw!

I throw it out to Hartnett like—also no pun intended—a lifefloat.

“Oh, my God, Robert Shaw. Jesus God,” he says, removing his hand from his head in relief and looking up toward the ceiling as a big smile forms along his face. “It’s so upsetting to me. All I could think of was ‘Ya follow?’ from The Sting. Like, he’s such an amazing actor.”

You’ll have to forgive him for forgetting. It’s a big week for Hartnett, and he feels the pressure. Only a handful of days after Verity, in which he stars alongside Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opened at the top of the box office, Below will drop all six of its creature-feature episodes on Netflix.

To put it simply, Hartnett has the juice right now. Still, “it’s a little bit scary,” he says, adding that it’s the first time in his career that he’s had two big projects release in such close proximity. “It’s intimidating, of course. It’s a make-or-break week in a certain sense… We’ll see what happens. It might be the last time that we speak.”

It’s a good thing, then, that Below is a success, inviting viewers into its world at first with its Jaws qualities before slowly but surely evolving into a story about family, community, and, yeah, giant sea monsters too. As the patriarch at its core, Hartnett plays it as well as anyone could: He’s a vulnerable, 40-something dad who’s been scarred by his past in the village where he’s spent his whole life, and willing to do anything for the love, affection, and the safety of his three children. The show, which Hartnett is also an executive producer on, makes great use of the actor’s large stature—his 6-foot-3 frame fills just about every shot he’s in—and his ability to express more with a couple blinks of his eyes than most actors can with a full page of dialogue.

Ahead of Below‘s release, Men’s Health spoke with Hartnett about heading to Newfoundland to make the show, working on Oliver Stone’s first new movie in a decade, and the forthcoming 25th anniversary of Black Hawk Down.

Watch Below Here

MEN’S HEALTH: You’ve done so many horror and genre projects through the years, and Below is firmly in that space. Did that put it in your wheelhouse?

JOSH HARTNETT: It’s funny, it’s never the horror element that really draws me to these projects. 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 in a horror film. Comparing Trap and Below is almost impossible. They’re just such different beasts.

Yes, in a way they’re part of the same genre, but I would say this is more mystery and suspense mixed with a fair amount of comedy, which I really, really like about it. And it’s also a dissection of a certain place in the world. Newfoundland is such a specific character that comes through the entire show.

MH: Talking about different kinds of horror, Below is a big-scale monster story, which you haven’t really done yet. It feels big in a way that not a lot of projects are.

JH: The buzzword on pretty much every episodic project they could send to me is “cinematic.” Everybody says “cinematic,” but that’s not always the case. People have different ideas of what that means; my idea of “cinematic” is this grand scale mixed with human drama. So, you get the dichotomy of the two, this giant-scale production mixed with these intimate moments with these characters.

That’s what cinema does so well, and that’s why things are considered cinematic. And this show is no different. It has that very core group of characters you get to know, and you’ll follow them through anything, and then you get to see this vast world open up. It’s epic. I keep saying that word, but it is epic.

MH: There are a lot of references to Jaws in the early goings of the show, down to a famous dolly zoom on your face. When you were in production in Newfoundland, how much of a North Star was Jaws?

JH: Because it was a familiar vernacular to everyone, we wanted it to be the starting point, but then we wanted to move away from it. In the first episode especially, you get that Jaws sensibility, but then it starts to open up and become something stranger.

And because we’re working in six episodes as opposed to a two-hour film, we have more time to explore all of those monster tropes, and explore the characters more in depth, and what the world is in a broader context. So, it’s a different animal once you get past episode two. We had more room to experiment after that.

MH: How much of Calvin were you pulling from your own experience as a father?

JH: There was lots I could use from my own life, but mostly it was getting up to Newfoundland and getting to know the people who do this sort of thing for a living and live in this environment. As much as there are similarities in the fatherhood element, he’s nothing like me and I have none of his experiences. So, I had to put myself into that world and spend a lot of time with the people up there, spend a lot of time on the water, just spend a lot of time with fishermen generally, which was kind of incredible.

MH: How did living in Newfoundland influence your performance?

JH: I found out I had an immediate love for the sea, which I didn’t know I would have. Growing up in Minnesota, I had no connection to the sea. So, when we took a small fishing boat out to where we could barely see land, it was disorienting. But it was also uniquely grounding because you felt yourself so small in this vast wilderness.

And it was a wilderness too, because in the first week we were there, I went on an even smaller boat out to go whale watching and then to go swim with the whales, and these giant humpbacks were swimming right underneath our boat, just coming under like that. And they were so much bigger than our boat.

They could have just bumped us and we all would’ve gone into the freezing sea, and it would’ve been over. But they were more curious than anything, and they would do… like a dance. They would come up, and they would slap their flukes in the water, kind of saying hi. They would look at us, you could see their eye underwater, and they would be looking at you, checking you out. Things beneath the surface are, in a very real sense, alien to most people. Obviously, we’re playing with the idea of that and growing it a bit, but it’s part of the idea of what’s out there already when you’re there.

MH: How did you crack the Newfoundland accent? It’s so specific.

JH: I did some work before I went to Newfoundland, but it really didn’t start in earnest until I got there. Then, I started listening to people, and then I started listening to this radio show called The Broadcast, which used to be called The Fisherman’s Broadcast—it’s the longest-running show in Canada. It’s been on since the 1950s, and you got a sense of everybody on the island and their little quibbles, the things that were happening on that day, all talking with different versions of an accent.

If you spend any time in Ireland or in the U.K., you get a sense of this where from one village to the next, it can be a completely different accent. There are major changes. And the same thing exists there in Newfoundland, but we’re talking about vast distances, really, because from one cove to the next can be quite a ways, and if there’s no road between, the only way to get there is by boat, and some people don’t have a boat, so the only way they’ll go is by ferry, and they’ll rarely do it. So their town will have a very specific sound, and I was able to hear all these sounds on The Fisherman’s Broadcast.

And then just speaking to the dialect coach we had there, getting in touch with the other actors who were playing my family so that we could all sound like we were from the same place. We did a lot of this work together, and everybody on set was incredibly helpful. Nobody made fun of us. Everybody really wanted us to show their world in a good light.

MH: After Below, you worked on Oliver Stone’s new movie, White Lies. He’s one of the legends. What was that experience like?

JH: He’s one of the directors that inspired me most when I was a kid. Before I even knew how important a director was, I knew who Oliver Stone was. My education into directors and their real sensibilities came around the time of Quentin Tarantino, and it was at that same time that I really started to recognize Oliver Stone’s work and realized that I’d seen a bunch of his films.

Now, so getting to know him… I’m playing a loosely fictionalized, adapted version of himself, of Oliver. I couldn’t have gone deeper into the crucible of an Oliver Stone filmmaking experience. I had other actors come on for a few days here and there. Willem Dafoe came on for a few days, and Michael Douglas came on for a few days—people who had worked with Oliver before. And they were always saying, “How’s it going? How are you feeling? We know it’s rough right now, but he always gets great performances. It’s going to be incredible.”

He likes to put his actors through the wringer to get them to a point where he feels like they’re not relying on habit and are actually struggling to find something that’s earnest and real. I always like to do that anyway, so I felt happy to be pushed in that direction.

It’s a process of breaking you down in a way, and I’m happy to say I saw it recently, and it’s very good. I’m excited for the world to see it.

MH: You worked with another great director, Ridley Scott, on Black Hawk Down 25 years ago. What do you remember most about that experience?

JH: Ridley Scott meant a lot to me as a filmmaker as well, because, again, around that same time when I opened up in the early ’90s to what a filmmaker was, I realized, oh, yeah, I’ve watched Blade Runner, I’ve watched Alien, I’ve watched a million of Ridley’s films, and had loved his work.

I remember specifically watching Thelma & Louise not long after it came out. I don’t know why, but I was just blown away by how immediate it felt. There was an energy to it that most films don’t have.

I was an enormous fan of Ridley Scott. When I had finished working with Jerry Bruckheimer on Pearl Harbor, he came back and said, “Look, this is another military film, but it’s with Ridley Scott.” I was like, “Oh, 100%. Yes, absolutely, I’m 100% in.”

I met Ridley, and he, for whatever reason, just said, “Yep, you’re my guy.” We had a very short conversation. Then, we got to know each other, and I’ve never met anyone who is so visually talented in my life.

When we were on set, he had 10 camera teams working at any given time, and he would be talking to me about how he wanted it to play out. We would set up these long sequences, and he’d want me to go through the chaos, which he was going to be filmed from all these different angles. But then I would also end up in some sort of closeup situation, and he wanted to capture that after all the running. It was important that I knew where I was going to be moving to, and he would map it out for me. We were just going down a bumpy road outside of Rabat, and he was drawing the shot itself.

The drawing, swear to God, had the depth of field and the feel of what the shot ended up being. He already knew exactly what he wanted, and that’s why I think he’s frustrated so many DPs in the past. He’s been like, “No, no, no, I know this. I know this job better than anybody.” He’s an extraordinarily talented and driven human being, and he’s still working so hard.

I spoke to him actually about a month ago about a project, and he’s still pushing. He’s always making 1,000 things. It’s inspiring to be around him because we would all like to be like that at some point, right?

MH: I mean, what, 88 years old and still rocking?

JH: Still loving what you do, getting something out of it, and giving something back to the community. It’s crazy.

MH: I always love asking actors about working with Ridley Scott. Benedict Wong had a similar answer about his sets a couple of years ago.

JH: This is a totally different scenario, but when working with Christopher Nolan, everybody’s 100 percent directed on the thing they have to do because that’s the kind of set Chris inspires. There are very few people on that set, and [Nolan’s cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema] is holding the camera, or Chris is there with him, and they’re the only two people who know what the shot is. But it’s very directed, and everybody’s there ready to work because it’s a sacred space.

It was like that with Ridley. He didn’t require people to not have cell phones, but luckily, it was 2001, so there really weren’t that many cell phones, and people were not that distracted. But at the same time, we knew that no matter what we were doing, it was being captured by some camera, so we better be on and we better be good the whole time. It had that same effect, where everybody felt like they were really in it and really there to serve the director, which I love. That’s my favorite element of filmmaking: That it’s all in the service of this one vision. And when that works out really well, that’s magic.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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