Trap’s Josh Hartnett took inspiration from ‘psychopaths’ in showbiz for new role

‘They don’t mind stepping over people or doing horrible things to get where they’re going,’ said star

Josh Hartnett has said he took inspiration from people in Hollywood when playing a serial killer in his new film Trap.

The actor, 46, plays a murderer called The Butcher in the M Night Shyamalan thriller movie.

Trap follows a father and his teenage daughter’s night out at a concert, where the dad, portrayed by Hartnett, learns that the entire event has been set up in a bid to catch him.

“There are a lot of CEOs, politicians, people in our business… a lot of people who are at the top,” Hartnett told Entertainment Weekly, when discussing his inspiration.

“They don’t mind stepping over people or doing horrible things to get where they’re going, and not having any empathy is a pretty big sign of being a psychopath.

“Whether or not you’re murdering people, I’ve met people like this, you know what I mean?”

Hartnett recently revealed that his decision to step back from Hollywood for several years was influenced by his experiences being stalked by “borderline unhealthy” fans.

The actor was a big movie star in the Nineties and Noughties, appearing in films from The Faculty to The Virgin Suicides and Black Hawk Down.

He later took time off acting and moved out of America to live in Hampshire with his British wife, the actor Tamsin Egerton.

Hartnett and his wife Tamsin Egerton (AFP via Getty Images)

In recent years he has returned to big projects including in Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.

As an example of the stalking he had experienced, he told The Guardian that when he was 27, “a guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison.”

The actor concluded: “There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.”

Reviews for Trap have been mixed. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a moderately entertaining thriller” and Variety stating that each of the film’s many twists is “more contrived than the last”.

In a more positive review, The Wrap said that, while the film “doesn’t have the depth of Shyamalan’s most important films or the theatricality of his most memorably weird experiments” it is “one of his best thrillers”.

Trap is out in the US now, but will be released in the UK on 9 August.