From Heartthrob to Daddy: Josh Hartnett on the Joy of Playing Fathers, Why ‘Below’ Had a Perfect Ending and Why It Was ‘Refreshing’ to Not Have a Love Story

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. Fonda (Mackenzie Davis).

You’re in the rare air of starring in a big box office hit and a top streaming show at the same time. How do you process that?

It is wild. 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. I love that.

What was your process like for nailing the Newfoundland accent?

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. Then going in and talking to the dialect coach that we were using from Newfoundland and figuring out a dialect that would work for each of us as a family, so that we would sound like we’re from the same place. Then it’s just rinse and repeat. It’s having a lot of faith in the accent itself, even though there are always going to be … whenever you try to do something that’s new and people haven’t heard it before, there are going to be people out there on the internet who are going to respond negatively. But if you don’t take a risk and you’re not willing to get it right, for the sake of maybe saving yourself the slight 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 super important to us and very important for the crew in Newfoundland that we got that right, as unusual as it sounds to the average TV watching ear around the world.

How did you get your sea legs ready for the boat scenes?

I’m from Minnesota, as landlocked as it gets. I grew up on a lot of boats, but they were on small lakes. I understood how to dock a boat, I thought, but it’s different in the sea. I had to get my small craft license. I had to do quite a few tests. I had to take out the fishing vessels. I had to take out a subsequent number of bigger vessels, and then I had to be able to learn all the codes of the water, which of course is like learning the signage on the side of the road when you’re learning to drive. So I had to get my license, plain and simple. And then I had to spend a bunch of time out there with fishermen to get the feel of what it’s like to spend a lot of time at sea, and to become used to the water as an ecosystem, as opposed to just something that was sort of opaque to me beforehand.

I had the most magical introduction to being in this fisherman world, wherein the first week I arrived happened to be the migration season of the humpback whales. This is in early June last year. So I went out on this small craft with people that were teaching me the ways of being a fisherman. And we’re in this tiny Zodiac, which is no longer than 20 feet. It’s very small and made of rubber and plastic. It’s fiberglass, maybe, but it’s very light. These giant humpbacks, a pod of them came up and around us and started breaching and started waving. They do this thing where they wave their flukes and slap the water, and they came under the boat and investigated us. If they wanted to at any time, they could have flipped us over and we would have been a mile off the shore. When we got to the shore, it’s sheer rock face. There’s no way we’re getting out. It was an immediate understanding of our position out on the water as being precarious, but also the majesty of the ocean ecosystem that I don’t think I had any understanding of before I got there. It was like this perfect aha moment where I realized, “OK, this is what these people feel in communion with when they’re out there on a daily basis.” It was perfect for me.

People have different ideas about messaging in TV and movies, but “Below” had a strong through-line about environmentalism that felt natural and tied into what you’re saying.

100%. But also what I thought was amazing about Jesse’s script is that so often you’ll read a script these days where they’re trying to shoehorn a political point of view into a show or a film in order to achieve a certain audience, or put their own views on display in order to signal who they are as an artist. What I realized when I read this script is that all of these things they’re talking about within the show are embedded in the culture. It didn’t feel preachy to me. It felt earned. It felt honest. And when you’re up there, you get this sense that all of these different pieces of this ecological and social puzzle are being put together in a way that is keeping this community in a very difficult situation.

There are many communities like that on the island of Newfoundland, and around subsequent islands in the area and all down the East Coast, but it is this marriage of a completely unique environment and type of character with a unique-to-me accent that I hadn’t heard before. This culture felt unexplored, and yet it felt completely earned and real and honest. It’s on display when you get 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 you’re like, “Oh, thank God this really exists. This isn’t just a small section. This is the way a lot of people are still living up there.”

Along with “Trap,” this is your second big project in the last few years that focuses on parenting. Especially now that you’re a father real life, is there a different gear you tap into to play those roles, versus the more heartthrob parts you had earlier in your career?

A lot has changed in my life and in my career due to the fact that I’m a parent, but also due to the fact that I’m just older, I have more perspective. But parenthood gives you a lot of perspective. It probably would have given me perspective if I had kids in my 20s. It’s the chance to be outside of yourself. You’re making choices and decisions based not solely on your own needs and desires, you’re making them based off someone else. And that takes a total mind shift. I think every parent would say that there’s a before and after, and it’s surely affected my work, and it’s definitely affected my life. I can break it down and I could say a lot of different things about it, but it’s affected it wholly.

When speaking with Jesse and Jessica, they said that originally in the script Calvin and Dr. Fonda were never a “will-they-won’t-they” couple, but that you two had a natural chemistry. When you first read the script, did their connection ever speak to you at all? Or did it just bloom because you and Mackenzie had an easy connection?

I don’t know. I guess it was the latter, because when we started, I thought, “How refreshing is it that there are these two leads of the show and we aren’t playing with that notion,” that this is two people that are in the hunt together. We kept comparing ourselves to the crowd on Scooby-Doo, we’re coming together to figure this story out. But by about episodes three or four, Jessica came up to me and said, “You know, there’s something happening here between you guys. We have to resolve it some way.” Both Mackenzie and I thought, “Well, it can’t be romantic. It doesn’t make any sense.”

But if they start to acknowledge that maybe there is a future beyond … they’re self-imposed exiles. She’s obviously from the west coast of Canada and is now living in this very remote place in northeastern Canada. She must have some sort of past that she’s decided not to explore. He has a past that he’s been wearing around his neck for a long time and is not willing to let go of. But through the course of the story, maybe they have sort of gone through a transformation and maybe there is room for this. But we didn’t go anywhere with it, which was good. It works really well that way. But Mackenzie’s 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 are listening to them. I felt the same. It was a happy outcome for the show.

You also had great chemistry with your giant squid co-star. Were you acting to a tennis ball?

Mostly just acting to the sea, like a crazy person out there on a boat speaking to the sea. That was the extent of it. There were no tennis balls. They’d be like, “Could you look a little bit further right when you do the speech?” But it’s speaking to something internal that I felt connected to. It was more conceptual than it was thinking of it being a squid. I do this a lot when I’m working, where I am transposing pieces of my own life onto characters’ lives to give it context within me, so that I feel like it’s living. Then I let that go and just go for it and use the text. In this, I used a few different corollaries, but the squid was never a squid in my mind. It was something deeper.

If there’s a second season of “Below” and we get to revisit these characters, what would you like to explore?

This is going to sound like bullshit, but it’s true: I haven’t thought about it at all because it was supposed to be a standalone entirely. It would be interesting to take Wade (Calvin’s son, played by Charlie Heaton) and Calvin out of the context of their home. This is just me thinking about it now and having sort of intuited that you might ask something like this and thinking about it just a little bit 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 so strong a character and so important to character. But from a development standpoint, it’d be very interesting to see these guys navigate something else, somewhere else. But it makes sense as a standalone. It works very well on its own. We’re just very pleased that people are responding to it the way they are and actually having theories and enjoying it. Getting into the deep end with it, no pun intended. [laughs] That sounded really cheap and cheesy … sorry.

What are the roles and scripts that are most likely to get your attention these days?

The things that are always going to get me interested are the people involved. Beyond that, if it’s something I haven’t explored before, I really want to try it. You never can tell what’s going to come along, and staying open to that. I’ve stopped putting my own concepts of what I would like my career to be and started to look at what’s there and be practical about it. “This is what people are offering.” I love to do new and different work, and stuff that’s exciting to me is usually the stuff I haven’t really thought about that much beforehand. When someone like M. Night Shyamalan comes along and says, “Hey, you want to play a serial killer who’s a really good dad?” “Yeah! I don’t know why, but I got to figure this out. I got to know this guy. I got to figure out how to play him.” It was the same thing with playing Ernest Lawrence. I had very little understanding of who he was. I was excited to dive in and read [Michael Hiltzik’s nonfiction book] “Big Science” and to get to know this character in among that larger story. And, obviously, the chance to work with Christopher Nolan. So it’s that combination that’s always exciting to me. I can very honestly say I have no idea what the next thing is going to be, which is exciting to me as well.