Sunday sees the Showtime premiere of the horror series “Penny Dreadful,” starring Eva Green, Timothy Dalton and Josh Hartnett, the last looking a little more weathered and a little less generic, at 35, than he used to.
Hartnett, the Minnesota native who once played the Hollywood role later assumed by Channing Tatum — ubiquitous heartthrob — seems to have spent more time off the radar than on it, a move he describes, in Details magazine, as deliberate.
On the occasion of his re-emergence, let’s take a look back at the glory days of Young Hartnett, who may have become synonymous with mediocre rom-coms (hello, “40 Days and 40 Nights”!) and Michael Bay’s bombastic “Pearl Harbor,” but always showed a yen for more interesting material and a knack for working with talented directors.
We hope he gets his wish in the weird, gory “Penny Dreadful.” If not — well, you’ll always be Trip Fontaine to us, Josh.
‘Penny Dreadful’
‘The Faculty’ (1998)
This Robert Rodriguez-directed horror movie saw Hartnett as a student at a high school where something was very wrong with the teachers.
‘The Virgin Suicides’ (1999)
Hartnett played the archetypal high school babe in this Sofia Coppola film, in which he romanced, then deserted, Kirsten Dunst’s character.
‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001)
Ridley Scott’s rendition of a US military mission gone wrong, set in Somalia, was a gritty ensemble drama in which Hartnett was one of a team of elite soldiers sent into a war-torn city.
‘O’ (2001)
A modern-day version of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” directed by Tim Blake Nelson, let Hartnett sink his teeth into a bad-guy role for a change.
‘Sin City’ (2005)
Hartnett reteamed with Robert Rodriguez to play a small part in this visually arresting adaptation of a Frank Miller graphic novel.
‘The Black Dahlia’ (2006)
Brian de Palma’s telling of an infamous old-Hollywood murder saw Hartnett as a boxer-turned-investigator looking into the killing of a starlet.