If it feels like filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is fired up and reenergized with his new single-setting thriller “Trap,” that’s because he is. It’s his best film of all ages; it is tense, tightly wound, and stress-inducing but entertaining with a dark sense of humor. It’s also akin to Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” where it attempts and pulls off some bold structural moves in its terrifying and disturbing final act that will take you by surprise. Right alongside the director for the ride, Josh Hartnett delivers one of the best and most layered performances of his career.
In “Trap, Hartnett stars as Cooper, a doting and loving father who takes his young tween daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a big stadium concert featuring the pop sensation Lady Raven (Shyamanlan’s daughter and real-life R&B singer Saleka Shyamalan). But Cooper is living a double life, and as the movie reveals early on, he’s also The Butcher, a serial killer who’s been terrifying the suburbs and city of Philadelphia. During the concert, Cooper eventually learns from a friendly concert employee that he manipulates the entire concert as a sting operation to catch the killer.
While no one knows the identity of “The Butcher,” the FBI and authorities have been tipped off that he’s somewhere in the building. What ensues is an anxious, taut thriller about a killer who feels the walls closing in on him. Of course, it’s an M. Night Shyamalan film, so there are twists and turns, but there are also narrative and story transformations that we can’t spoil here.
As Hartnett says, “threading the needle” of this complex character is challenging. He’s a psychopath, sure, but he’s also a genuinely caring father who loves his daughter. He’s also an actor of sorts, juggling two different identities, partly compartmentalizing two different lies, and partly living a life of completely consuming duplicity from those he loves. It’s an intricate role that asks the audience to empathize with the killer, or at least sympathize with the very human anxiety of being a trapped rat and also be fearful of a truly deranged individual. And through it all, Hartnett effortlessly threads the needle of this unique and multifaceted killer.
This movie is a great thrill, a nice roller coaster with an unexpected ending that’s deeper than just a twist. How did this part come along? Did you really have to fight for it?
Well, not exactly, but it was a boring Hollywood story, honestly. I heard Night would make a movie and that there might be a role that was right for me and the right age. My agent connected us, and we’d met before in the past , but we never found an opportunity to work together. And we got on the phone and had a great conversation. He said, “I’m going to send you the script.” And I read it because, with Night movies, they don’t send out scripts. Like they just, “He’s casting for something” and that’s it. So, I read the script and was like, “Oh man, this is going to be challenging.”
Oh, you didn’t know much outside the basics in a call.
Yeah. So, first of all, if the characterization isn’t exactly right, you could turn the audience off the character entirely and immediately, and then they don’t want to go on this ride. But if it works, it could be an incredibly malicious little trick [laughs] that you get to play where you end up siding with this serial killer as you go through this day in his life.
Ultimately, you get a sense of… what he’s truly capable of. And it’s terrifying. So, I love a challenge, and I love Night’s work. I immediately wanted to be involved, and then I just had to get to work on figuring out how a psychopath would operate in this situation.
It’s a tricky thing. It’s classic Hitchcockian in a way, but we don’t see many modern movies where you have to empathize with the killer. Even David Fincher’s “The Killer” is more about experiencing his POV than genuine sympathy like you have here. So the father-to-killer thing and those subtle dynamic shifts were probably complicated.
Totally. And I know you’re not saying this, but I wouldn’t compare it to “The Killer” because so many films ask you to empathize with characters that could fit on the psychopathic scale. After all, they don’t have empathy, right? They’re people that will do anything to get what they want. They want that one person, they’re falling in love with that one person, they want to get to that one person, etc. Everybody else, in the way, is collateral damage. Or they’re in a war situation, and they’re going to get into the enemy base, and who cares who dies? Or any of those eighties heroic pics we all remember that certain actors did. Those characters are all psychopaths, in a way. And, for me, it was, what is our interest in this achievement quality? We don’t mind if somebody achieves a goal or if they do horrible things because the ends justify the means so often in the way that we portray a character on screen or what we relate to on screen.
So, it wasn’t really the psychopathic-ness that I was worried about. It was the darkness of the deeds, and we had to be consistent throughout, and we couldn’t cheat the audience. So, we had to show upfront that he’s this horrible character. But then we also had to somehow make it feel like it’s okay to have fun with this character throughout the whole piece. And what I realized in the work and research that I was doing beforehand was—I could read so many books on psychopathy. There’s a book called “The Psychopath Test that puts it in really simple terms. There are 10% of us that have psychopathic tendencies. Not everybody is aware of who has them. Still, some people rise to the top of many industries, including CEOs of big businesses that we all have seen on screen or politicians, who could be 100% diagnosed as psychopathic.
But we tend to side with them or read empathetically into what they’re doing because we believe they have the same stuff that we have. So within that context, within this character, we look at how he’s treating his daughter, and we think, “Oh, he’s a great dad,” But really, it’s just really a great cover, you know? What’s interesting about this movie is that throughout this piece, our psychopath starts to believe that maybe he has this secret tool called empathy in some way and believes he cares about this other character. So, it’s like a psychopath suddenly coming across this notion that maybe he’s a little bit less of a monster than he initially believed he was. And that’s a cool trajectory for a character to take because it’s so unusual. So, I don’t even remember what the question was.
That’s okay. You’re just getting into the meat and psychology of this character, which is great. I might be overthinking it; it’s just acting, but is there a psychological toll of playing this character as a father? You’re a father who is constantly lying to everyone he loves and harbors a dark, evil secret.
The biggest thing that I stressed when we first started talking about doing the movie was that I wanted people to understand who they were dealing with by the end of the film. Yes, it’s all a fun ride, but then you have to know that this guy is actually capable of these horrible things. But it’s not an either-or. His daughter still loves him, and he feels something toward her and toward his family that is unnerving him in a way. It’s a weird movie, but I wanted it all to be in there, all those complexities to be in there for the character to really work. I felt that it needed to be that way. And, yeah, the darkness of it is the baseline.
So, honestly, it wasn’t a lot of fun on days when I had to utilize all of that. But Night’s such a warm presence and contradictory to the dark subject matters that he explores and writes about. He’s a very warm and funny guy. We wanted to make this as entertaining and fun as possible. So, there were moments when the veneer starts to crack for Cooper, we were able to go to places that seemed just almost absurd in the characterization, but it worked very well within him. And so, from an acting standpoint, it was fun to explore because I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to do that again. From a personal point of view, it’s not the most fun thing to be inside of all day and then come home to your kids. That’s not the best.
I appreciated all the emotional turns this movie takes, especially in the last act, which is really complex. It’s terrifying, disturbing, and also kind of heartbreakingly brutal.
Yeah, brutal, and there’s something unleashed about Cooper that is terrifying. I found the ending had four different little emotional arcs that signified very different things. And I was like, “Oooh, I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” I don’t know where this goes from here.
Unlikeable characters are sometimes challenging for some actors, but the quote-unquote unlikable elements here are really baked in and inescapable. But were you ever concerned about the character and the balance between fatherly and psychopathic?
No, no, I feel like my job is to fulfill the director’s vision and maybe bring in concepts that the director might have been aiming at but hadn’t really thought of. And occasionally, you can push something in a direction that inspires the director, but it’s their movie. An actor can only be as good as the director that they’re being directed by in a film because they’re the one who gets to edit it. They’re the ones that have the vision for it. And in this case, he’s the one who wrote it. My hope is to take the script that Night wrote and make the character more than what he expected it to be on the page.
And not different, but just adding more depth and more colors and that nuance. I’ve always liked to do that. I think stretching as an actor is the most fun part. Maybe some actors think of themselves as brands. I don’t. I like to be creative and find it most interesting to be creative when you’re thinking in terms of other people’s expectations. I also think the best directors are very collaborative. I love the collaborative nature of our business and I love working with great directors, and I feel very lucky to be able to work on this one with Night.
No spoilers, obviously, but would you be up for sequels if that became a thing? If Night were interested?
[Laughs] If it were a thing? I mean, yeah, I think I would love to work with Night again. I loved the experience, and I hope we work together again on something, whether it’s a sequel to this or something else. I’ve been lucky recently to work with some of the directors that I love most in the industry. And I hope they see in me a collaborator who wants to push the envelope, try new things, and help realize a cool vision. And, yeah, if he wanted to do another one, sure. If we had someplace to go with it… but then again, Night would come up with a really cool story, right? He would come up with something unexpected. That’s what I love about him.
He’s not coming at it from the usual place. He does this consistently throughout his career, where he’ll take a genre that we think we all know, he’ll upend the genre, and come at it from a completely different perspective: a ghost story from the ghost perspective; who doesn’t know he’s a ghost, an alien invasion story where you don’t see the alien invasion, and you don’t even know if it’s really happening for most of the movie. Those things are amazing, and this one is like a contained thriller, nineties style in a way that is, is told from the antagonist point of view.
Obviously, you’re also hinting at working with great directors like Christopher Nolan, and you had a great turn in “Oppenheimer.” It feels like you’re having a moment, that something has shifted, but has anything changed for you? Has the personal plan changed at all?
No, what I want to do is consistent, and I’ve always been trying to do the same thing, but people seem to be more interested in what I’m doing right now within the industry. And that’s super gratifying because then that brings audiences along. And if audiences are interested in what I’m doing, then—look, I’m not making these movies for myself—then I’m super happy about that. I think people will recognize that this is a very fun but difficult character to take on, unlike other things. Hopefully, they’ll be interested in seeing what I do next, which will hopefully be entirely different. I’m constantly trying to switch it up. So, like you said, recently, I’ve been working with many directors who have many more eyeballs on them, and that’s wonderful and gratifying to me.
“Trap” opens in theaters August 2 via Warner Bros.