Josh Hartnett talks ‘twisted’ new thriller ‘Trap’

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When he got to the last page of the script for Trap, actor Josh Hartnett had one thought: “This is going to be a huge challenge.”

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In the new thriller, written, produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Split, Old), Hartnett, 46, plays Cooper, a mild-mannered firefighter who takes his teen daughter (Ariel Donoghue) to a pop concert. But as singer Lady Raven (Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka) takes the stage, Cooper becomes alarmed at the amount of law enforcement inside the venue. It turns out the police have hatched a trap to capture a serial killer known as “The Butcher.”

The twist is that Cooper is the killer they are hunting, and over the next 100 minutes he needs to try and make his way out of the arena without alerting his daughter or cops to his true identity.

His resulting performance has some already declaring we’re in the midst of a “Josh Hartnett renaissance.”

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“Night didn’t tell me what the movie was about when we first spoke. He just said, ‘I’ve got something I want you to read.’ He sent it to me and after I read the script, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so twisted,’” Hartnett says in a Zoom interview from New York City.

Partly inspired by the real-life 1985 “Operation Flagship” — which resulted in the arrest of more than 100 wanted fugitives after they were lured to a stadium with the promise of free NFL tickets — Shyamalan said he got the idea for Trap after asking himself: “What if The Silence of the Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”

“Night is the warmest guy you’ll ever meet, but he has a twisted storytelling sensibility,” Hartnett says.

Best known for his roles in The Faculty, The Virgin Suicides, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down, 40 Days and 40 Nights, Penny Dreadful and Oppenheimer, Hartnett wasn’t sure he could play the smirking psychopath, but he was eager to take on the role.

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“If there’s a big opportunity to be surprising, but (if there’s a chance) I could fall on my face, I will always take the chance at being surprising every time,” he explains. “If I fall on my face, so what. I swung for the fences. This is the ultimate version of that for me. And it was so much fun to make because Night is Night and he has a clear vision of what he wants to do and he allows you the space to create character and he always gets great performances out of his actors. It was a lot of fun.”

For his part, Shyamalan says he was interested in casting Hartnett as a serial killer because he thought the project would give the actor a chance to reinvent himself.

“When I met him, he looked me in the eye, and I just knew he was ready to do anything — there was an energy, an electricity coming off of him,” Shyamalan says. “To play Cooper, I needed someone that was all in and was ready to take a risk. I think for audiences, one of the great reasons to come to this movie is to see the amazing performance Josh gives.”

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Playing a rare bad guy has ended up being one of the most fun experiences Hartnett has had on a movie set.

“Comedies are nerve wracking because if it’s not funny you can feel that in the moment. It’s the worst,” he says. “As far as villains go, you get to exercise a lot of creative and performing muscles that you can’t really access when you’re doing straight drama or comedy. That’s why actors like to do them. I looked like I was having a great time, and I was having a great time.”

Some of the research into psychopathy was dark, but Hartnett says it was fun to explore a villainous character and make him “as wild as possible.”

“I did the research because I wanted to make sure the character is consistent and (audiences) can believe the number of masks he wears to contain his secrecy and his life,” he says. “I didn’t want to cheat the audience. So I did a ton of research on psychopathy and sociopaths and read books about serial killers to try to get into the headspace of someone who does not care and almost needs that feeling of being really close to the fire and almost being caught to feel alive. I felt like that was the exciting thing that separates him from everyone else. The closer he gets to being caught the more exciting it gets and the more he gets to let himself out from behind the curtain.”

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As for that real-life sting, Hartnett breaks into a grin as he contemplates the humour behind “Operation Flagship.”

“I don’t know how they found them, but they sent out these notices to all these wanted felons telling them that they had won tickets to a (Washington) Redskins football game. If they went to the (stadium), they’d get the tickets and they also told them they’d have a chance to win Super Bowl tickets,” Hartnett says with a chuckle. “So of course, all these felons came out of the woodwork thinking it was their lucky day. There were cops dressed as cheerleaders and cops dressed like mascots. It was funny.”

Trap opens in theatres Friday, Aug. 2.

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