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"FacebookPinterest\n\nHe's explaining why, before shooting The Black Dahlia, he felt it was necessary to learn how to box\u2014not to learn how to look like a bor but to learn how to box. In the film, based on James Ellroy's novel and directed by Brian De Palma, Hartnett plays Dwight \"Bucky\" Bleichert, a former 1940s prizefighter turned police detective, a man whose psyche was hammered into shape inside a boxing ring, \"fighting noname opponents in a noman'sland division.\"\n\nSo for five months, Hartnett worked out with Sankara Frazier, the founder and chief trainer of a Minneapolis boxing club called the Circle of Discipline, putting in three and fourhour days and keeping his weight at 175 on the dime, like a real light heavyweight training for a shot at the title.\n\nThis would appear to be due diligence if Dahlia were a boxing movie. It is not. The film features only one actual boxing scene\u2014a fight between Bleichert and his partner, played by Aaron Eckhart, which is bloody and thematically crucial but unfolds mostly in montage\u2014and therefore Hartnett's halfyear Million Dollar Baby apprenticeship more precisely resembles craziness. But when you're a recovering teen idol, and you have spent years trying to prove your fitness for grownman parts, and a legendary director hires you to play an obsessed cop in a lurid crime film whose script specifies that your character used to do a little boxing, you do not mess around. You tape up your knuckles and step into the Circle of Discipline.\n\nI ask Hartnett if all that training made him feel like he could have taken a real fight.\n\n\"Sure,\" he says. \"But I would have lost.\" (He caught a couple of wild left hooks from Eckhart when they squared off onset. That was enough.)\n\nIt would have been an interesting career decision for you, I say.\n\n\"Mickey Rourke did it, didn't he\" Hartnett says.\n\nYes, I reply. And he really messed up his beautiful grille in the process.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Hartnett says almost dreamily. \"But now he's got a whole new career, as the kind of questionable dude.\"\n\nYou get the feeling Josh Hartnett would love to play a few questionable dudes. That he would like to be thought of as shifty, sketchy, or unreliable\u2014or at least as the type of actor who can project those qualities convincingly; that from now on, he wants his career to be about exploring these dark places, and that this is why he was not merely willing but on some level eager to be punched in the face by Aaron Eckhart, signifying as it did his commitment to the character and his willingness to suffer for his art.\n\nOr maybe, secretly, he just wanted to rough up that pretty face a little bit. Because right now, Josh Hartnett is about the last guy you think of when you think of questionable dudes. Once, back when nobody knew much else about him, he played a generically virtuous American hero in Pearl Harbor, one of the least subtle blockbusters ever made, and since then he has been trying to convince the world that he has something more to offer it than boring righteousness\u2014that he can play men who aren't straight shooters, good soldiers, or boyfriend material.\n\n\"When that film came to me,\" he says, meaning the one with the harbor, \"I wasn't sure if the directors I wanted to work with would respect me if I did it. I wasn't sure what the mood was going to be. It's hard to overcome that prettyboy thing. I don't know,\" he says. \"I always wanted to be considered an actor.\"\n\nIt wasn't the prettyboy thing. Okay, maybe it was. But it wasn't just that. Let's be honest Josh Hartnett was foisted upon us. Sometimes we choose actors. We build an appreciation of them casually, over time, and then one day we say, Hey, Paul Giamatti, we are down with you. Go on with your bald, bad self. But sometimes forces just align, and an actor becomes instantly unavoidable, which in turn makes him easy to hate. This is how it went with Josh Hartnett. We were just told that he was a star. His ubiquity came so suddenly that by the time we could put a name to his face (the square jaw, the safetyscissors haircut, the vaguely otterish good looks) we were already sick of looking at it.\n\nHartnett got the moviestar push long before he had anything resembling a moviestar r\u00E9sum\u00E9. He had been good in one great film\u2014Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides\u2014and decent in a couple of postScream horror icks, but outside the fantasy lives of teenage girls, he'd made no real mark. But by spring of 2001, people were calling him \"a throwback to the old Hollywood legends, a cross between Gary Cooper and Montgomery Clift.\" Josh Hartnett, they told us, \"is going to be fucking huge.\"\n\nGranted, the people in question were Pearl Harbor producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director/fuckinghugeness expert Michael Bay, respectively, but the impression stuck; Hartnett's inevitable enormity was now part of his official narrative. You couldn't look at him squinting sheepishly from the cover of Vanity Fair without feeling like the x was in. He could have been the new Brando and he still would have seemed like New Coke.\n\nPearl Harbor turned out to be lousy\u2014a bombastically wetbrained attempt to land Top Gun on the deck of Titanic, with a stiff, bewildered performance by Hartnett. And its lousiness seemed to validate our skepticism. It made the concept of Josh Hartnett, incipient megastar, seem about as genuine as those computergenerated Japanese ghter planes with which he'd shared the screen. There was one more big movie after that, Ridley Scott's grim Somaliwar drama Black Hawk Down, in which Hartnett is sort of quietly devastating. But by then it was too late\u2014we had already tried and convicted him of being a manufactured leading man. By then, even Josh Hartnett was getting a little tired of Josh Hartnett.\n\nFor the full article, pick up the October 2006 issue of GQ.\n\nAlex Pappademas is a GQ staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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