Josh Hartnett Talks Fight or Flight’s Stunts, Blondes Having More Fun
Fight or Flight star Josh Hartnett spoke with ComingSoon about his new action movie. The Pearl Harbor actor discussed going blond for the part, doing elaborate fight scenes, and more. Vertical will release the film in theaters on May 9, 2025.
“Exiled American agent Lucas Reyes is given one last chance to redeem himself – the assignment is to track down and identify a mysterious, international high-value asset known only as The Ghost on a flight from Bangkok to San Francisco. Complicating matters, the plane is filled with assassins from around the world who are assigned to kill them both. The pair must work together in a fight for their lives. At 37,000 feet, the stakes have never been higher,” says the synopsis for Fight or Flight starring Josh Hartnett.
Tyler Treese: Josh, you are using everything in these fight scenes, and really taking advantage of the environment. You’re using snack trays. There’s a brutal scene with a seatbelt that I’d never seen before. It’s so fun. What did you like most about the creativity of these action scenes? They’re really elevated.
Josh Hartnett: So the whole stunt team was working with us in tandem while we were rewriting it to kind of give it the flavor that we ended up having for the movie. We wanted to make sure that they understood before we started was that, yes, we want these fight sequences to be brutal, but we want them to have a point. A beginning, middle, and end that actually changes the characters, or especially my character, somewhat, and to recognize that it’s funny. There’s levity in there, no matter what. We had to add something that was going to be unusual and funny and going to give the fight sequences not only the sort of brutal action element, but also some comic value. Then, of course, they created things that were beyond our expectations.
It took me a couple of weeks to really learn them and get in there with them. That part was a lot of fun. I mean, it was brutal. We only shot this in about 25 days, so basically some of these longer action sequences, we only had like a day or a day and a half to shoot, and everything had to go right, and we got very lucky, and they all went well.
I love your look in the film, and some fans are obsessed with the bleach-blond look. You look like you’re having a blast throughout the entire film. So, is it true that blondes have more fun?
Josh Hartnett: In this case? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I try to have as much fun making films as I can, no matter what. I had a lot of fun making Trap last year. But I will say that something about changing my look entirely, going blond allowed me a sort of latitude of freedom or something like that. I just felt very much unlike myself. Even off-screen, my wife loved it. She thought it was really cool.
When we first dyed it, it looked really cool, but we couldn’t have that. We wanted the character to look a little bedraggled, so we had to let it grow out, but I knew that that was gonna be the case. So when it grew out a few weeks, it looked kind of ragged, but still awesome. And it was fun to go back and see people who hadn’t seen me in a while, like dropping the kids off at school and stuff. The look on their faces was… They didn’t want to say anything. They thought maybe it was just a choice for me, but you could tell that they had theories.
Julian Kostov is in the movie, and he said that you were his favorite actor growing up. How surreal is it that you’ve been in the industry and at such a high enough level that you’re working with costars who idolized you?
That’s crazy. He never told me that. That’s a really sweet thing for him to say. That is crazy. I don’t feel old enough to have people having grown up on me now being adult co-stars. But I am, I guess. I’ve been doing it for over 27 years. That’s really flattering. That’s really nice. Thank Julian for me when you talk to him again.
Thanks to Josh Hartnett for taking the time to talk about Fight or Flight.
Source: Comingsoon.net