From Heartthrob to Daddy: Josh Hartnett on the joys of playing dads, why 'Under' had a great ending and why it was 'cool' not to have a love story

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the first season of "Below," which is now streaming on Netflix. Josh Hartnett is falling on the A-list, but he's more focused on making sure he's on time to pick up school. I catch the actor via Zoom in between his housework in England, where he is with […]

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the first season of "Below," which is now streaming on Netflix.

Josh Hartnett is falling on the A-list, but he's more focused on making sure he's on time to pick up school.

I catch the actor via Zoom in between chores at home in England, where he lives with his wife and four children. In conversation, he lights up most when talking about the simplicity of family life or the actual process of acting. RELATED STORIES Hillary Clinton co-hosts James Murdoch's Vox Media podcast on the 2026 midterm elections with Cara Swisher.

Decades after the chaos of becoming a teen idol threatened to dwarf her emotionally resonant roles in films like 1999's "The Virgin Suicides" and 2001's "Black Hawk Down," the celebrity side of the business isn't showing much interest in Hartnett — who seems to have a personality. The lead seems pointless. Popular in Variety

Over the past five years, Hartnett has had something of a career renaissance, featuring in high-profile projects that show different sides of him. He played a psychotic assassin (and loving father!) in 2024's The Trap, a brutal war machine in the 2025 action comedy Fight or Flight, and of course the key role of Ernest Lawrence in 2023's Oppenheimer.

His October is busy with quite a few different projects, as he stars in the sexy drama Verity, which topped the box office in its opening weekend, as well as the much-talked-about Netflix series Below, in which he plays a Newfoundland fisherman named Calvin who must defend his family against a giant squid.

After a powerful conversation with Below creator and showrunner Jesse McKeon and executive producer Jessica Rhodes explaining the series finale, I wanted to get Hartnett's take on the Canadian romp adventure. Below, he delves into the show's environmental message, going up against a massive sea creature, and how close Calvin came to hooking up with Dr. Fonda (Mackenzie Davis).

is wild At the same time, because I live so much outside the system, it's maybe a little less wild for me when I have to wake up in the morning and do a school run. I've had my kids complain about a million things over the weekend and I have to take care of them, and there are no posters around. It's not like I witnessed this happening. I ask more questions from teachers and parents at school than I usually do about my work. But all the conversations with people who are in L.A., and talking to Jesse, talking to Jessica, getting that sense of people's reaction, not just in terms of the numbers, but in terms of the conversations they're having... It seems like people are really getting the show, and that's incredibly gratifying, because everyone involved worked so hard.

As far as "Verity" goes, I was still doing press the week after that. So I was in New York, could witness it emerge and subsequently succeed during that week. It's always surprising to me, but a very pleasant surprise, when something you've worked on becomes part of the conversation and the culture. I love it.

The process involved spending a lot of time with people from different parts of Newfoundland, and then listening to this thing called "fishing broadcasts" on a daily basis, which gave me all these different regional dialects. Then come in and talk to the accent coach we used from Newfoundland and find an accent that works for each of us as a family so it sounds like we're from the same place. Then just rinse and repeat. It's a lot of faith in the accent itself, even though it's always been there...anytime you try to do something that's new and people haven't heard it before, there are people on the internet who say no. But if you're not going to take the risk and want to do it right, to maybe save yourself the mild embarrassment of the first week, having people say they don't understand what you're saying, I don't think it's worth doing. So it was very important to us, and very important to the crew in Newfoundland, that we get it right, as unusual as it sounds to normal TV people around the world.

I'm from Minnesota, as dry as it is. I was on many boats, but they were on small lakes. I thought I understood how to dock a boat, but it's different at sea. I had to get my small industries license. I had to do some experiments. I had to take out the fishing boats. I had to take out some bigger ships, and then I had to be able to learn all the water codes, which of course is like learning road signs when you're learning to drive. So I had to get my license plain and simple. And then I had to spend a lot of time there with the fishermen to get a feel for what it's like to spend a lot of time at sea, and to get used to the water as an ecosystem, as opposed to something that was kind of opaque to me before.

I had the most magical introduction to this fishing world, where the first week I arrived happened to be humpback whale migration season. This is in early June last year. So I went on this little craft with people teaching me fishing techniques. And we're in this little Zodiac, no more than 20 feet. It is very small and made of rubber and plastic. It might be fiberglass, but it's very light. These giant humpbacks, a pod of them came up and around us and started breaking and started shaking. They do this by waving their hands and slapping the water as they come under the boat and investigate us. If they wanted to at any moment, they could flip us over and we were a mile offshore when we got to the beach, it's sheer rock. There's no way out. It was an immediate realization of our situation with water as precarious, but also the enormity of the ocean ecosystem, which I don't think I had any understanding of before I got there. It was like this great aha moment where I realized, "Okay, this is what these people feel when they're out there every day." It was perfect for me.

100% But also what was amazing about Jesse's script is that you often read a script these days where they're trying to put a political point of view into a show or movie in order to reach a certain audience, or they're putting their opinions on display to show who they are as an artist. What I realized when I read the script is that all these things that they talk about on the show are embedded in the culture. It was not a sermon for me. It was a feeling to get. It felt honest. And when you're there, you get the sense that all of these different pieces of this environmental and social puzzle fit together in a way that keeps this community in a very difficult position.

There are many communities like it on the island of Newfoundland, and around the next islands in this area and all over the East Coast, but this one marries a completely unique environment and a personality type with a unique accent that I've never heard before. It felt like an unknown culture, and yet it felt completely earned and real and honest. It will be displayed when you go up there. I spent a lot of time talking to Jesse before I got up there. You want to believe that he's not selling you a bill of goods, and then you get there and say, "Oh, thank God it's really there. It's not just a small part. It's the way a lot of people still live there."

A lot has changed in my life and career because I'm a parent, but also because I'm just older, I have more perspective. But being a parent gives you a lot of perspective. If I had a kid in my 20s, it probably would have given me perspective. This is a chance to be outside of yourself. You make choices and decisions not only based on your own needs and desires, but also based on someone else's. And this requires a complete mental change. I think every parent would say there's a before and an after, and it's certainly affected my work and it's certainly affected my life. I can break it down and I can say a lot of different things about it, but it's totally affected it.

i don't know I guess it was the latter, because when we started, I thought, "How cool is it to have these two leads in the show and we're not playing with that concept," that it's these two people hunting together. We kept comparing ourselves to the Scooby-Doo crowd, we come together to figure this story out. But around episode three or four, Jessica came around and said, "You know, there's something going on here between you guys. We've got to work it out somehow." Mackenzie and I both thought, "Well, it can't be romantic. It doesn't make any sense."

But if they begin to admit that perhaps there is a future beyond... they are self-imposed exiles. He's obviously from the west coast of Canada and now lives in this faraway place in northeastern Canada. He must have some kind of past that he chooses not to explore. He has a past that he has been holding on to for a long time and is not willing to let go of it. But in the course of the story, maybe they have undergone some kind of transformation and maybe there is a place for this. But we didn't get to where it was good. It works really well that way, but Mackenzie is a very funny actor, a very funny person. When you have good humor with people on set, you have a certain chemistry with them because you just listen to them. I had the same feeling. It was a happy ending for the show.

Mostly they just deal with the sea, like a madman talking to the sea in a boat. There was no tennis ball. They say, "Can you look a little further when you're giving a speech?" But it speaks to something internal that I felt connected to. It was more conceptual than he thought a squid would be. I do this a lot when I'm working, where I transfer pieces of my life into the lives of the characters to give it a context within me, so that it feels like it's living. Then I dropped it and just went for it and used the text. In this case, I used a few different results, but the squid was never a squid in my mind. It was something deeper.

It sounds like crap, but it's true: I didn't think about it at all, because it was supposed to be completely standalone. It's interesting to take Wade (Calvin's son played by Charlie Heaton) and Calvin out of their home context. It's just me thinking about it now and I kind of feel like you might be asking something like this and I'm thinking about it a little earlier today.

I don't know if it makes sense because I love the fact that the place itself is such a character, and it's such a strong character and so important to the character. But from a development standpoint, it's going to be really interesting to see these guys move on to something else, somewhere else. But as a standalone it makes sense. It works very well on its own. We're just so happy that people are responding to it the way they are and actually having theories and enjoying it. Going in at the deep end with that, no pun intended. [Laughs] That sounded really cheap and cheesy… I'm sorry.

The things that always interest me are the people involved. Beyond that, if it's something I haven't explored before, I really want to try it. You can never tell what's going to happen, and stay open to it. I stopped expressing my concepts of what I would like my job to be and started looking at what was out there and acting on it. "That's what people have to offer." I love doing new and different things, and the things that excite me are usually things I haven't given much thought to before. When someone like M. Night Shyamalan comes along and says, "Hey, do you want to play a serial killer who's a really good dad?" "Yeah! I don't know why, but I have to figure this out. I met this guy. I have to figure out how to play him." Playing the role of Ernest Lawrence was the same. I had very little understanding of him. I was excited to dive in and read [Michael Hiltzik's non-fiction book] Big Science and get to know this character in the middle of that bigger story. And obviously the chance to work with Christopher Nolan. So it's a combination that's always exciting to me. I can honestly say I don't know what's next, which is exciting for me as well.

This interview has been edited and condensed.