The Direct Approach

Josh Hartnett’s magnetic screen presence in the youth-oriented films “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides” in the late ‘90s earned him teen pinup status. And he won more hearts as a doomed World War II pilot in this year’s “Pearl Harbor,” with his homespun appeal emerging unscathed from that film’s bombardment of bad reviews.

But the boyish charm hides a more sinister nature in Hartnett’s latest screen performance as Hugo Goulding, the malevolent modern-day Iago in “O.” Director Tim Blake Nelson and writer Brad Kaaya’s take on Shakespeare’s “Othello,” which opens today, transplants the Bard’s Venetian tragedy to the campus of a Southern prep school, where treachery abounds against the backdrop of high-stakes high school basketball.

Co-starring with Mekhi Phifer as slam-dunking Odin James and Julia Stiles as a 21st century Desdemona, Hartnett, as Hugo, engineers a chain of events that erupt in a deadly climax faithful to the original play.

Notes Nelson: “A lot of our work together centered on pushing Josh towards the darker aspects of his character. He really isn’t oriented that way. For all his star appeal, Josh is a young guy from a very stable family in the Midwest. He’s very diligent and responsible and courteous and hard-working.”

Hartnett, a 23-year-old Minnesota native, thought of his character as a “passionate guy, an emotional guy.”

“Hugo sets things in motion that I don’t think he really expects to be resolved in the way that they are,” Hartnett says. “As it goes along he’s kind of amazed at how well things take shape, in their demented way.”

Minus the “demented” angle, the same could be said for the way Hartnett has found himself on the fast track to stardom. In just four years he has appeared in eight films, with two more to be released, beginning with his “introducing Josh Hartnett” credit in 1998’s “Halloween H20.” And although his “Pearl Harbor” character crashed and burned, the film had the opposite effect on Hartnett’s career, catapulting his image onto magazine covers from coast to coast.

“There’s more attention paid to me when I go to the grocery store than there used to be,” Hartnett says, when asked how his life has changed in recent months. “I’ve never really taken any stock in all that. I want to do good movies, things that interest me. As long as I can do that, I’ll be satisfied.”

And all those magazine covers? “I try not to look at them,” he says. “At first I’d be going through the checkout line, and I’d watch and see if anybody picked up that magazine. Then I’d think, ‘You’re an idiot, who cares?!’ I can’t gear my tastes towards general public opinion,” he adds. “Now, when I see my face on magazines, I just kind of look at it and go, ‘That’s nice,’ pretend it’s somebody else and move on.”

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With the high-voltage “Pearl Harbor” media circus behind him, Hartnett seems content with a more low-key approach to life--and film promotion. He’s come to Los Angeles for four days to do publicity for “O,” and he’ll return for the film’s premiere a week later.

But Hartnett remains solidly grounded in his home state, where he recently rented a house and “friends and family are there to keep me in line.” And, after working nearly nonstop for the last five years, he’s on a self-imposed break. “I’m taking a little bit of time to just hang out, be a normal guy.”

Being a “normal guy” seems a high priority for the lanky Hartnett (he’s 6 foot 3), who started acting while still in high school, his early childhood dreams of being a football player scotched when a knee injury landed him on the sidelines. After graduation, he briefly studied theater at SUNY Purchase in New York state, then headed Los Angeles in early 1997. Before long, he’d won a role in the short-lived ABC series “Cracker” and supporting-to-lead parts in feature films.

His next job isn’t lined up yet, but Hartnett will soon be back on theater screens in two completed projects, Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down,” a big-budget military drama about the 1993 U.N. mission in Somalia, and the romantic comedy “40 Days and 40 Nights,” in which he plays a man who decides to give up sex for Lent--then meets the girl of his dreams.

But first there’s “O,” which Hartnett worked on in the spring of 1999 and is only now being released. In the wake of the Columbine High School shootings that April, Miramax, the studio originally set to distribute the film, became increasingly uncomfortable with the film’s provocative story line and violent conclusion. After repeatedly postponing “O’s” release, Miramax decided to permanently shelve it.

The film’s producers then filed a breach-of-contract suit. The issue was resolved when Miramax sold domestic distribution rights to Lions Gate Films, which plans a wide national opening in 1,500 theaters. Nelson says that he is relieved that “O” is finally being released but adds: “More important to me is what the movie actually is and I’m happy that an unmolested version of the film that I set out to make is coming out.”

Oddly enough, the long delay in getting “O” to movie screens may actually help at the box office: Since it was made, Hartnett and his co-stars have all become more recognizable and popular with audiences (Phifer in MTV’s “Carmen: A Hip Hopera,” Stiles in “Save the Last Dance” and other films).

“I don’t really see the connection between this story and Columbine,” Hartnett says of the controversy. “Obviously, the basic plot is somewhat similar, but this is not a story that’s trying to answer those questions [about school shootings]. Its intent is to bring up those questions.” And he views “O” as “a really powerful adaptation of ‘Othello,’ just the right place, the right time.”

As to what motivates Hugo’s lethal course of action, Hartnett feels that “he’s got jealousy in his bones. He’s been dealing with a father [the school’s basketball coach, played by Martin Sheen] who’s never really been there for him except on the basketball court, and a mother who doesn’t stick up for him either. It’s a feeling of abandonment.”

Director Nelson says of Hartnett’s chilling performance: “He is such an accurate reflection of that unlikely perpetrator of violence.”

What makes Hartnett’s duplicity so believable in the film is the slouchy brand of “aw shucks” earnestness that comes across in his film roles, whether he’s the hero or the villain. It’s a quality that comes across off-screen. Hartnett says that if someone had told him when he first took to the stage at age 16 in a Minneapolis production of “Tom Sawyer” (he played Huck Finn) that in six years he’d be on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, he would have “told them to shove off, give me a break.”

“I don’t think of myself much differently than I did back then. I still care about the same things,” he says. “A lot of outside things have changed--I own a car, I can rent a house--but I don’t feel any different.”

And he has no plans to alter the route he’s been taking. “If you’re going on the freeway,” Hartnett muses, “you get to the place you want to a lot quicker, but you don’t see the surrounding area. I’ve taken the side streets pretty much my whole life, so hopefully that’ll keep working out.”

Hartnett obviously hasn’t spent much time lately on L.A. freeways, which rarely offer the shortest distance between two points. Then again, given how far he’s come in such a short period of time, maybe his approach is the most direct, after all.