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"  Josh Hartnett wasn&amp;#039;t an actor so much as a cultural phenomenon. Between the ages of 19 and 23, he made something like 10 movies\u2014including Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down\u2014but the one truly worth savoring is Sofia Coppola&amp;#039;s The Virgin Suicides. Hartnett starred as Trip Fontaine, the feather-haired teenage lothario who strolled down the high school hallway to Heart&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Magic Man.&amp;quot; It was a movie star&amp;#039;s entrance, but before long the backlash (This kid with the unibrow? A movie star?) and the nicknames (Josh Hotnett) were too much too soon, and Hartnett retreated home to Minnesota for 18 months to figure out what the hell just happened. While he&amp;#039;s worked mostly in indie films since, Hartnett, 35, hasn&amp;#039;t been able to stay away from blockbuster women. He&amp;#039;s been linked to Scarlett Johansson, Rihanna, Amanda Seyfried, and now the 25-year-old English actress Tamsin Egerton. This month, Hartnett makes a triumphant return to form in the creepy-cool Showtime series Penny Dreadful, about a twisted Victorian England in which Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein have all come to life. Get your freak on. Did you get into acting to meet women? Not exactly, but it was a happy coincidence. I was at a visual-arts school and did a play on a lark. The casting director asked me to audition for a couple of movies and a TV show. I didn&amp;#039;t look back. The money was great.  Related: Aaron Paul on Delivering Pizza and Losing His Virginity That&amp;#039;s an honest answer. Well, I was 18 years old and had $5 to my name.  Were you always popular with women? Absolutely not.  Come on. The first two years of high school I was 5&amp;#039;2&amp;quot; and chubby. I had a lot better go the second half of high school than I did the first\u2014let&amp;#039;s put it that way.  Is there anything you&amp;#039;d do differently about your first time?  Everything. It&amp;#039;s never the most flattering memory. Experience counts for something.  You&amp;#039;ve made a habit of dating costars. Is that out of convenience? I don&amp;#039;t recommend it to young actors. [Laughs] You can make a lot of enemies in the business that way. But when you work with somebody every day, it&amp;#039;s like trial dating. You develop a fantasy about them. It doesn&amp;#039;t always work out, does it? When you&amp;#039;re dating someone like, say, Scarlett Johansson, are you ever allowed to complain? Not to your friends, no. They want to hear all about what you&amp;#039;re doing. But they don&amp;#039;t want to hear any complaints. Back when I dated a few very beautiful, very famous girls, I said something once\u2014it wasn&amp;#039;t really a complaint\u2014and my buddy said, &amp;quot;Oh my God, my diamond shoes are too tight.&amp;quot; He coined the phrase.  If I got all the women you ever dated to agree on something about you, what would it be? That I&amp;#039;m a pretty difficult boyfriend. Really? You seem so genial. My expectations are a little high sometimes. I push things a bit too far. I&amp;#039;ve got the Icarus complex. So they&amp;#039;d probably say I could relax a little more. You stumped for Obama on the campaign trail. Could you date someone with opposing politics? I have an ex-girlfriend\u2014who shall remain nameless\u2014who had ideas about immigration that I found just completely unbelievable for a modern person. It was basically isolationism. Everybody should just be in their own place. I was like, What?  How soon after that conversation did you guys break up? Almost immediately. Very charming girl, but she&amp;#039;s a fascist.  Do you believe in monogamy? Like, do I believe in unicorns? I take it that&amp;#039;s a no? I believe in monogamy. It&amp;#039;s not easy, but it can be amazing. Your trust and bond can deepen so completely. You give everything and so you have a partner\u2014a real partner\u2014as opposed to someone who&amp;#039;s around until the next best thing comes along. What would it take for you to get married? When the question of having kids raises its head, then I think it&amp;#039;s time to consider. Did you read Jeffrey Eugenides&amp;#039; book The Marriage Plot? No. What&amp;#039;s his takeaway? Everyone turns out to be pretty disappointing in that book. If you want perfection, you&amp;#039;re on the wrong planet. It&amp;#039;s about enjoying the imperfections. Finding people whose imperfections fit with yours, and vice versa. Is that where you&amp;#039;re at?  I wouldn&amp;#039;t call them imperfections in my own life. They&amp;#039;re personality traits.  There&amp;#039;s a good deal of nudity in Penny Dreadful. Have you always been comfortable naked? I&amp;#039;m comfortable naked\u2014in my life. On film, if it doesn&amp;#039;t help the story, it&amp;#039;s not my favorite thing. I do show some stuff in the show, but I fight to make sure that it&amp;#039;s funny or character driven. How does showing your ass move the story along? John Logan [the creator] wanted the sexuality to be frank. He&amp;#039;s obsessed with this book, Inventing Victorians, which talks about repression\u2014and how the Victorians would hide the legs of the piano because they were considered too sexy. He wants to dispel those myths. The Victorians were having some fun too.  Is there a secret to keeping a girlfriend happy? Let them be on set whenever they want, with whichever costar you&amp;#039;re working with. Never say the scene is too sensitive. They get very suspicious. It sounds like there&amp;#039;s a story there. I&amp;#039;m sure there is. This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. And here, exclusive for ELLE.com, Mickey&amp;#039;s extended interview with Hartnett. One of the characters in Penny Dreadful is the ageless, morally corrupt Dorian Gray. Has a woman ever accused you of being vain? Yeah. I&amp;#039;m an actor, man. Of course. There&amp;#039;s a vanity to what I do that&amp;#039;s in it&amp;#039;s DNA. I&amp;#039;m making faces in front of a camera. One of your first films was 40 Days and 40 Nights\u2014about a guy who gives up all sexual stimulation, including masturbation. Have you ever attempted that?  At the time I did. I wasn&amp;#039;t seeing anybody and I went as long as I could without pleasuring myself and it was\u2014especially in your early 20&amp;#039;s\u2014just stupid. How long did you last? I honestly don&amp;#039;t remember. I think I lied to the press and said I almost made it to the end, but I don&amp;#039;t think I did. I don&amp;#039;t think I made it very close at all. You became absurdly famous, absurdly fast. What was the attention from women like? When Pearl Harbor came out, my life changed dramatically. To avoid paparazzi we&amp;#039;d get two cars going different in directions. and sometimes I was getting in the trunk of one of them to get from point A to point B in Los Angeles. I was 22 years old, and I needed some reality. I&amp;#039;d always wanted to take some time off and go home. So I did that. You bought a house in Minnesota and got back together with your high school girlfriend. Were you consciously trying to find something real? It wasn&amp;#039;t like I went home and just said, Ellen, let&amp;#039;s get back together because that&amp;#039;s what I want right now. We kind of re-met and re-fell in love and all that. Is there a song lyric that gets love right? There&amp;#039;s a Bob Dylan song, &amp;quot;Girl From North Country,&amp;quot; which is fantastic. That song is about love lost. Why that one? There&amp;#039;s a nostalgia to it. I have a tendency to romanticize things way out of proportion. I&amp;#039;ve heard it said many times that hindsight is 20-20. But it&amp;#039;s 50-50, you know? You only see half of what was back there. I respond to someone who looks in both ways. Who acknowledges that nostalgia is filled with untruths. Who&amp;#039;s able to see the stark reality for what it is. Is there a song in your music library you&amp;#039;d be ashamed for a woman to see? There&amp;#039;s always something embarrassing. I embrace the embarrassing. What&amp;#039;s the worst thing on there? I think I still have 2 Live Crew. That&amp;#039;s not bad. You grew up in the 80s. An ex of mine did put one Madonna song on there. That doesn&amp;#039;t count. It was a recent Madonna song. No offense to Madonna\u2014 None taken, I&amp;#039;m sure. You went to Catholic school in Minnesota. Did you ever have a crush on a nun?  No, man, you didn&amp;#039;t see the nuns. How could you tell when these girls were interested in you or interested in &amp;quot;Josh Hartnett?&amp;quot; Or did that even matter? I couldn&amp;#039;t. You know, I couldn&amp;#039;t early on, so I made some mistakes. Kind of fell in love with the wrong people, I think. Live and learn. What did you learn? Tons of things. Breaking up with people, getting back together with the wrong people. I&amp;#039;m 35 now, it&amp;#039;s a completely different story. I don&amp;#039;t even feel like the same kid. You worked at a local video store as a teenager. Did you have a favorite nude scene? I liked that movie The Doors a lot. I think I liked scenes where the girls were naked probably the most. There was a lot of nudity in it and I was pretty excited about that. Has a girl ever made you cry? Of course. When a relationship goes wrong and it&amp;#039;s something you really believed in, that&amp;#039;ll make you cry. You worked with Warren Beatty on Town &amp;amp;amp; Country. He&amp;#039;s a legendary ladies man. Did you two compare stories? No. But I&amp;#039;ve dated a couple girls who&amp;#039;d gone on meetings with Warren. He&amp;#039;s a total legend and such a cool guy. I hope I&amp;#039;m not talking out of turn, but, you know, he&amp;#039;s monogamous and he&amp;#039;s in this relationship with his wife and obviously they have kids and they&amp;#039;re very happy. But he says meetings are now like his cheating. I meet girls that I really think are interesting and have a coffee and talk about work and it&amp;#039;s great. Have you ever received any valuable advice about marriage? Alan Alda and I did a movie together a few years ago. He&amp;#039;s been married to his wife for, like, 50 years. One of the best things I&amp;#039;ve ever heard about marriage\u2014and I guess monogamy comes with marriage\u2014he said, I&amp;#039;ve been married to a different woman every five years and she&amp;#039;s been married to a different man ever five years. We&amp;#039;ve changed that completely. We&amp;#039;ve had to learn how to live with each other at times. We&amp;#039;ve obviously hated each other at times. But we just have to learn to love each other again. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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