SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the first season of “Below,” now streaming on Netflix. Josh Hartnett is having an A-list fall, but he’s mostly focused on making sure he’s on time for school pickup. I’m catching the actor via Zoom in between errands at his house 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. Decades after the chaos of being a teen idol threatened to dwarf his emotionally resonant performances in films such as 1999’s “The Virgin Suicides” and 2001’s “Black Hawk Down,” the celebrity part of the business doesn’t interest Hartnett very much — which makes sense, as he always seemed to be a character actor blessed with leading-man good looks. Over the last five years, Hartnett has had something of a career resurgence, appearing in high-profile projects that showed far different sides of him.
He played a psycho killer (and loving dad!) in 2024’s “Trap,” a brutal fighting 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 diametrically different projects, as he’s a lead in the sexy drama “Verity,” which topped the box office its opening weekend, as well as the much-discussed Netflix series “Below,” in which he plays an accented Newfoundland fisherman named Calvin who must defend his family from a giant squid. After a robust conversation with “Below” creator and showrunner Jesse McKeown and executive producer Jessica Rhoades breaking down the ending of the series, I wanted to get Hartnett’s take on the rip-roaring Canadian adventure. Below, he gets deep on the show’s message of environmentalism, acting against a massive sea creature and how close Calvin was to hooking up with Dr.
At the same time, because I live so far outside of the system, maybe a little bit less wild for me when I have to get up in the morning and do a school run. I’ve got my kids complaining about a million things over the course of the weekend that I have to take care of, and there aren’t any posters around me. It’s not like I see the event happening.
I get more questions from the teachers and parents on the school run than I usually do about my work. But all of the conversations with people back in L.A. who are in the thick of it, and talking to Jesse, talking to Jessica, getting this sense of like how people are responding, not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of conversations they’re having … it seems like people really get the show, and that’s incredibly gratifying, because everybody who was involved worked really hard on it. As far as “Verity” goes, I was still doing press the week after that.
So I was in New York, able to see that come out and subsequently become successful over the course of that week. It’s always a surprise to me, but a very pleasant surprise, when something that you’ve worked on becomes a part of the conversation and the culture. The process entailed spending a lot of time with people from different regions of Newfoundland, and then listening to this thing called “The Fisheries Broadcast” on a daily basis that gave me all of these different regional dialects.
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