Josh Hartnett plays a brutal serial killer nicknamed “The Butcher” in director M. Night Shyamalan’s new psychological thriller, Trap, which hit theaters Friday.
And the 46-year-old actor revealed to Entertainment Weekly who was inspired to act by “psychopaths” he came face to face with in show business over the years.
“There are a lot of CEOs, politicians, people in our business – a lot of people who are at the top,” Hartnett said.
“They don’t mind stepping on people or doing horrible things to get to their destination, and having no empathy is a pretty clear sign of being a psychopath.”
With these ruthless real-life people in mind, Hartnett and Shyamalan felt they could craft the perfect complex character.
“Whether you kill people or not, I’ve met people like that, you know what I mean? So it was easy to take it a step further, make it a little bit more daring and make their cover really intense,” he explained.
Josh Hartnett, 46, revealed to Entertainment Weekly that he was inspired by the acting of real-life “psychopaths” he’s come face-to-face with in the entertainment world to play a serial killer in M. Night Shyamalan’s new psychological thriller, Trap.
Hartnett plays Cooper Adams, a serial killer who is the target of a police undercover operation.
In Trap, undercover serial killer Cooper Adams (Hartnett) takes his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to pop star Lady Raven’s big concert as a reward for getting good grades in school, only to realize that the police are using the event as a sting operation to finally catch him.
The former Penny Dreadful star then talked about how the entire film is shot from Cooper’s perspective, initially tricking the audience into empathizing with him.
This plot device has become a recurring one for Night and his films.
“Like Night is Night, he wants to offer the audience a new experience,” Hartnett explained. “He’s been doing this his whole career. He takes a ghost story and tells it from the ghost’s point of view. He takes an alien invasion story and doesn’t actually show the aliens.
“It’s like a retro thriller in a confined space from the perspective of the antagonist. It’s like Die Hard from the perspective of Hans Gruber.”
In addition to Hartnett and Donoghue, the cast also includes Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, Alison Pill, Marnie McPhail, Vanessa Smythe and Kid Cudi.
The director and the stars of his latest production have been present in movie theaters promoting their new thriller, with recent premieres in Rome, Madrid, Berlin, London and New York.
Shyamalan, who was born in Mahé, India, but raised in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, released two films in the 1990s before scoring his breakthrough with The Sixth Sense (1999).
In Trap, Cooper (Hartnett) takes his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to pop star Lady Raven’s big concert as a reward for getting good grades in school, only to realize that the police are using the event as a sting operation to finally capture him.
“Night is night, and he wants to give audiences a new experience,” Hartnett said of his director, who has made a career in the supernatural and thriller genres.
That sparked a string of big hits for the filmmaker, including Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002) and The Village (2004), eventually culminating in the release of Lady In The Water (2006), which barely covered its $70 million budget.
His biggest box office success was The Sixth Sense, grossing $672.8 million while working on a $40 million budget 25 years ago.
Written, directed and co-produced by M. Night Shyamalan, the two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker worked with a $30 million budget while making Trap.
To date, the film has grossed $6.6 million on its first day, including about $2.2 million from Thursday night previews.
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