Josh Hartnett

Pearl Harbor made $449 million in 2001 and cast him as the industry's next action star. He turned down Superman anyway. The studio system read that as career suicide; he read it as avoiding a decade-long franchise trap. Black Hawk Down the same year proved he could anchor serious fare, but by 2003 he'd reportedly left Los Angeles for Minnesota, describing the attention he'd attracted as 'borderline unhealthy.' A man had shown up at a premiere carrying a gun, claiming to be his father.

Twenty years later, Christopher Nolan put him in Oppenheimer as physicist Ernest Lawrence. He gained 30 pounds for the role and gave a performance that made critics wonder what they'd been missing. The film made $976 million. M. Night Shyamalan cast him as a serial killer in Trap (2024), which Cahiers du Cinema ranked the 9th best film of that year. He's not running franchise auditions. He's picking directors, and the directors are picking him back.

He reportedly has no social media and lives in the English countryside with his wife, British actress Tamsin Egerton, and their four kids. The kids are fully English in accent; he's still fully Minnesotan. At the height of his fame, he had a meeting with Christopher Nolan and pitched himself for The Prestige instead of Batman. Christian Bale got both. That looked like career sabotage in 2005. It reads differently now that Christopher Nolan called him back for Oppenheimer.