Josh Hartnett Regrets Turning Down Christopher Nolan’s Batman Role

Josh Hartnett’s career hit its apex around 2001, the year in which the now 36-year-old — who’d built up indie cred with such films as The Virgin Suicides and The Faculty — played the lead in two mega-hyped blockbusters: Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. Hartnett could get a meeting with any big-name filmmaker in the years that followed, at one point sitting down with Christopher Nolan as the writer-director was prepping the game-changing Batman Begins.

But as Hartnett reveals in a new interview with Playboy’s Stephen Rebello, he passed up on a chance to lock down the famous Batman cowl in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — a move he says was likely a mistake.

“I’ve definitely said no to some of the wrong people,” he told the magazine. “People don’t like being told no. I learned my lesson when [writer-director] Christopher Nolan and I talked about Batman. I decided it wasn’t for me.”

“Then [Nolan] didn’t want to put me in The Prestige. That’s when I realized relationships were formed in the fire of that first Batman film and I should have been part of the relationship with this guy Nolan, who I felt was incredibly cool and very talented. I was so focused on not being pigeonholed and so scared of being considered only one thing as an actor. I should have thought, ‘Well, then, work harder, man.’ Watching Christian Bale go on to do so many other things has been just awesome. I mean, he’s been able to overcome that. Why couldn’t I see that at the time?”

Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman (Warner Bros.)

While Bale has won an Oscar (for The Fighter) and has been nominated for a second (American Hustle) since first strapping on the Bat-suit in 2005’s Batman Begins, Nolan has indeed shown a pattern of loyalty to the actors he’s employed along the way. In addition to Bale, he’s also given parts both in and outside of the Batmosphere to performers like Michael Caine, Cillian Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Anne Hathway.

Hartnett previously revealed that he turned down roles not only as Batman, but also as other marquee superheroes Spider-Man and Superman. "I somehow knew those roles had potential to define me, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be labeled as Superman for the rest of my career. I was maybe 22, but I saw the danger,” he told Details in 2014.

The Saint Paul, Minn. native took a break from major movies after 2007’s 30 Days of Night, telling Playboy that the “intensity” of fame prompted him to spend more time in Minnesota with his family: “I did smaller movies, and I stopped working for a while.”

He’s made a nice comeback of late, though, spearheaded by his role as sharpshooter Ethan Chandler in Showtime’s hit supernatural series, Penny Dreadful. And considering the glut of superhero movies continually in the works, don’t count out the chance that Hartnett one day throws on a cape.