HOW TWO UNFORGETTABLE DECISIONS RUINED JOSH HARTNETT'S CAREER
He seemed destined to become the next Leonardo DiCaprio, but his career fell by the wayside. Two turning points explain why.
Preparations for the 2015 Met Gala. Vogue's almighty editor Anna Wintour prepares the guest list. "Who is this?" he asks looking at the photo of a man with tiny eyes. "Josh Harnett," replies her assistant (whom we're all picturing with Anne Hathaway's face), "and what has she been up to lately?" Anna Wintour questions again. Her assistant's response is devastating and simple: "Nothing." Wintour then proceeds to tear Hartnett's photo off the guest board, just as Hollywood discarded him a decade ago. A cruel fate, this one that shows the documentary about the Met Gala and the Costume Institute, The first Monday of May, for which he was the most promising star of 2001.
The truth is that Josh Hartnett never became a star. It seemed so because they told us it was and its first steps were those that Hollywood commands: teenage terror (The Faculty), indie dramas (The Virgin Suicides), epic romances (Pearl Harbor), war epics (Black Hawk Down) and finally a Sex comedy built around how handsome he was. 40 days and 40 nights, a success that borders on the status of a cult film in Spain, was a farce in which 25-year-old people behaved as if they were teenagers and Josh, with that face of being permanently freshly up, proposed spend 40 days without sex to redirect your life. The problem is that the girls in the movie were praying mantises with a lot of makeup that would make it very difficult for them. They made out in front of him, asked him to close the door in his face to get more excited at his rejection and even photocopied their asses to point their cell phone at the page. Because everyone knows this is how girls behave in the real world.
