Josh Hartnett

Josh Hartnett is an American actor whose three-decade career has produced multiple defining American film roles — particularly his 2001 lead role as Trevor in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. He was born Joshua Daniel Hartnett on July 21, 1978, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, into a working-class American Catholic family. His father Daniel Thomas Hartnett was a Saint Paul-area construction-business operator, and his mother Wendy Anne Hartnett was a homemaker. His parents divorced when Josh was three, after which his father subsequently raised him.

His 1995 first community-theater performance at the Youth Performance Company in Saint Paul, Minnesota — at age 17 — and his subsequent 1996 first feature-film audition produced his early-career American film public profile. His 1997 first credited TV appearance as Michael Fitzgerald on the ABC TV series Cracker (the American adaptation of the 1993 British TV series of the same name) launched his early-career American TV public profile.

His 1998 first feature-film appearance in Steve Miner's H20: Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (the seventh installment of the John Carpenter Halloween film franchise, alongside Jamie Lee Curtis) launched his early-career American horror-genre film public profile. His subsequent late-1990s and 2000s American film career has produced multiple American films — particularly Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999, alongside Kirsten Dunst), Roger Avary's The Faculty (1998), and Anne Fletcher's 40 Days and 40 Nights (2002).

His 2001 lead role as Trevor in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor (alongside Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale) — the World-War-II-era American Pearl-Harbor-attack drama — launched his early-2000s American film public profile. The 2001 film grossed $449 million worldwide on a $140 million production budget.

His subsequent early-2000s American film career has produced multiple American films — particularly Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001), Bobby and Peter Farrelly's The Black Dahlia (2006, alongside Hilary Swank), Robert Rodriguez's Sin City (2005), and Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia (2006). His 2018 reprisal of his earlier American film career across multiple late-2010s and 2020s American films — particularly Guy Ritchie's Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023), Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023, in which he played Ernest Lawrence), and M. Night Shyamalan's Trap (2024) — produced his later American film public profile. He has been with English actress Tamsin Egerton since 2012 (married 2024), and the couple has four children.

His name Josh is the English short form of Joshua (from the Hebrew Yehoshua meaning "God is salvation"). Josh has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names since 1880.