Josh Hartnett on Verity, Warren Beatty Chaos and an Oliver Stone Return

Josh Hartnett's new thriller Verity, directed by Michael Showalter and co-starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, opens in theaters on October 2 — just six days before his new series Below arrives on Netflix on October 8. In a new interview on The Film Stage's B-Side podcast, Hartnett called the timing "simultaneously terrifying" and admitted, "It's kind of a make-or-break week, this might be the last time we speak."

Hartnett said he joined Verity because of the people involved. "I love Anne and Dakota's work," he said, adding that Showalter belongs to a rare breed of director who serves the script and genre rather than stamping his own signature on the material. "There are very few of them who can take the audience's perspective, watch their film, and not be obsessed with putting their signature thing in it," Hartnett said. "And he just wants to serve the script and the genre. And he's so good at that—taking his ego out of the equation."

He described the finished film as "so Gothic and filled with a claustrophobic sort of noir intensity," but also "funny" and "charming." For his character, Jeremy, Hartnett drew not on his work with Brian De Palma on The Black Dahlia, as the interviewer suggested, but on a different lineage. "I had ultimately always thought about this as, like, an Adrian Lyne-style thriller," he said. The goal, he explained, was characters who seem ordinary at the start — "and then by the end, you're like, 'Oh, my God, these people are freaks!' They are!"

The conversation ranged across Hartnett's career B-sides. On the notoriously troubled Warren Beatty comedy Town & Country, directed by Peter Chelsom, Hartnett recalled: "I was hired to be on it for about two weeks, and I was there for months!" He spent the downtime in the trailer park alongside Diane Keaton, Nastassja Kinski, Garry Shandling and, one day, Charlton Heston, while Buck Henry rewrote the script with Beatty. The overrun cost him a role in a film "that became a massive hit," but he counts the experience of getting to know that cast among the things that have stuck with him.

Hartnett also confirmed he appears in Oliver Stone's new film White Lies, playing a character based on Stone himself — "it's not officially Oliver," he clarified — in the director's first feature in a decade. "When he asked me to be in a film with him... I had to do it," Hartnett said, calling Stone "totally underrated now" despite two Best Director Oscars and three for writing.

The interview touched on his early turn as Trip Fontaine in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, shot when he was 19. After watching a montage of his scenes at Coppola's MoMA award tribute last year, Hartnett said he was "pleasantly surprised" and "proud that it has stood the test of time." He also championed the underseen dot-com drama August — with its memorable final scene opposite David Bowie ("I'm already shaking!") — and called Lucky Number Slevin, written by his friend Jason Smilovic and directed by Paul McGuigan, "one of my favorite films I've ever been a part of."

Asked what drives his choices, Hartnett pointed to directors' ambition. "The ambition is the thing that I respond to," he said, citing Lech Majewski of Valley of the Gods and a two-month collaboration with Robert Duvall, who called him out of the blue with the greeting, "Hey Josh, it's Bobby D!"

With Verity and Below landing within a week of each other, and an Oliver Stone feature on the way, Hartnett closes a two-decade arc from teen stardom to the character actor he has said he always wanted to be — and he says he is proud of both new projects: "I'm very curious to see what people think of both."