Remember the early aughts when everyone was trying to figure out which of the new crop of heartthrobs was destined to be the next Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio ? And what an embarrassment of riches, the hot actor class at the turn of the millennium including Josh Duhamel , Tyrese Gibson , Ryan Phillippe , Freddie Prinze Jr. and Orlando Bloom . Then there was Josh Hartnett , who very much wanted to be excluded from that narrative.
Just 22 at the time, he was poised to follow up 1999's The Virgin Suicides with a turn in 2001's splashy war epic Pearl Harbor . A sure-to-be blockbuster with a $135 million budget and a cast that included Kate Beckinsale , Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ben Affleck , it was the type of film, Vanity Fair wrote in a 5,000-word opus , "that will virtually overnight make an international movie star out of a comparative unknown—who, in this case, would be Josh Hartnett, a kid whose dark good looks are of the type usually referred to as brooding, and whose eyes, though squinty, can read on film as having profoundly soulful depths.
" The piece was filled with predictions about how the Minnesota native's life would change, from producer Jerry Bruckheimer saying he'll have "girls and people wanting his autograph running after him" to costar Affleck insisting, "Simply put, Josh will get very famous very quickly and runs the very real risk of becoming a sort of one-man embodiment of the Backstreet Boys to hormone-crazed 15-year-old girls from Minnetonka to Tarzana." E.
