Josh Hartnett squashes rumors of feuding with Harrison Ford on the set of Hollywood Homicide

This summer’s highly anticipated film, Oppenheimer, sports an impressive list of cast members. One name on that list that some may not have heard from in a while is Josh Hartnett. Harnett was a rising star in the late 90s and early 2000s, and his name was apt for the time as he was, in fact, a heartthrob that would grace the covers of many magazines. It was his growing fame that actually made the actor want to step back and take a breath. He had been in films like Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down and says he was given offers for action films on the strength of those movies.

One of the films Hartnett made at the peak of his fame was a poorly received action comedy, Hollywood Homicide, which paired him up with Harrison Ford. Ford is beloved but also known for acting like a grump from time to time, sometimes to a comedic degree, and rumors had circulated that Ford and Hartnett never got along on set. Hartnett would tell The Independent that it was rumors like this circulating that made his fame tough to navigate. He would also clear up these reports once and for all.

Harnett explains, “Drama sold newspapers, especially back then. But we actually got along really well. There were things that we disagreed about on set as far as [the script], and there was a lot of rewriting happening. But it was misinterpreted as ‘they don’t get along!’. It certainly wasn’t a set that was filled with tension. I think I did call him ‘the bane of my existence’ when we were on the press tour for that movie, but that was just because he was constantly ribbing me. And that’s just his way.”

Both Ford and Hartnett are incidentally involved in two of the most talked-about projects of the summer, with Ford concluding his run as Indiana Jones and Hartnett playing Ernest Lawrence in Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer. Ironically, Hartnett would entertain the idea of playing Batman back when Nolan was looking for his Batman Begins star, so he took a meeting with him cause he was a fan of his work. “So here’s what happened. Warner Bros. wanted me to do one of their superhero films. Chris Nolan was directing one of their superhero films. I met him. I talked to him about it. It wasn’t something that was interesting to me at the time. I was on a different path to a lot of actors. And I was more interested in a film that Chris’s brother had written – The Prestige. I loved Chris as a filmmaker, and I really wanted to work with him, and I was hoping that if I was straight-up honest with him about not wanting to do the superhero movie, maybe I could do The Prestige…”

While that didn’t happen, clearly the director was impressed by Hartnett who, in addition to Oppenheimer, is also in the next season of Black Mirror. This definitely seems like a comeback year for the actor.