No, Josh Hartnett Didn't Almost Play Batman

Batman Begins woke something inside of me. I had always been comic book curious, dabbling in cartoons and movies based on comic book properties. However, it wasn’t until the ride home from Batman Begins with my older brother and his friends that my life changed. “That was just like a moment from the comics,” my brother’s friend Eric said. Not only did I go on to read any Batman comic I could get my hands on, but I also purchased the special edition DVD of Christopher Nolan’s first Bat film and watched it several times every weekend for several months.

Christian Bale set a very high bar (for me) for Bats. There was something tortured about his Batman. His Bruce Wayne felt entirely different from his brooding, damaged Caped Crusader. It was striking, intriguing, and, as I would learn, pretty comic-accurate, as Eric said. Still, it could have been quite different. In 2015, Josh Hartnett revealed that he met with Christopher Nolan about playing Batman, and now the director has emerged with more details.

In a recent interview with Variety, Nolan talked about meeting with Josh Hartnett for the role of Batman. According to Chris, Hartnett was not interested in stepping into George Clooney’s shoes. As Nolan said, “I met with Josh and if I recall, he was a young actor whose work I was very interested in. I had an initial conversation with him but he had read my brother’s script for ‘The Prestige’ at the time and was more interested in getting involved with that. So it never went further than that.”

At a time when multiverse stories are all the rage, it’s fun to think of what could have been. However, others got even closer than the disinterested Hartnett. As Cillian Murphy said recently, he even got to try on Val Kilmer’s costume. Though, he said it was immediately clear that he wouldn’t be a good fit. Maybe Hartnett had a similar feeling. Or, perhaps, he had no interest in jumping into a franchise whose latest venture at the time had been wall-to-wall ice puns.

Can you blame him?