Josh Hartnett has revealed the real reason behind his disappearance from Hollywood at the height of his career.
Harnett was one of the biggest names in Hollywood in the late 90s and early 2000s after his breakout role in Halloween: H20 alongside Jamie Lee Curtis.
It went on the star just as well College, Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down.
Hartnett was then approached to play Superman, but turned down the coveted role twice, before also turning down the chance to play Batman, a role that then went to Christian Bale.
He then did the unthinkable for most actors; decided to give up the limelight almost entirely.
He fired his agents, left Los Angeles, moved back to his home state of Minnesota, and gave up acting entirely for two years before continuing to pursue only a few more challenging but smaller projects.
“People's attention on me at the time was borderline unhealthy,” Hartnett said of his decision to shed his A-list status almost overnight.
When asked to clarify whose attention, he added: “Well, look, I don't want to put too much weight on this. There were incidents. People showed up at my house. People who were following me.”
At the height of the spotlight, Hartnett was just 27 when a man showed up at one of her premieres holding a gun and pretending to be his father in an attempt to get close enough to the star.
Later, the man ended up in prison because of the incident.
“It was a lot of things. It was a strange time. And I wasn't going to be ground for the mill.”
“I didn't want my life to be swallowed up by my work,” he added. “And the idea at the time was to give it all up. And you saw what happened to some people then. They were wiped out by it. I didn't want that for myself.”
Since then, Hartnett has returned to the spotlight, notably to star in the upcoming thriller. Trapwhich hits cinemas in Australia next month and has been described as 'Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert'.
Hartnett also has three other films in the works, incl The Long Housedirected by James Franco.
