Josh Hartnett retreated from Hollywood partially because people were being extremely weird

Josh Hartnett is experiencing an extremely well-deserved career resurgence right now. He starred in Oppenheimer, one of the buzziest movies of last year, and will appear in M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, which is buzzy for an entirely different reason, next month. (The memeable caper was apparently pitched as “Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert.” What’s not to love?) Still, the roles the actor has taken on in recent years—which also include a stellar performance opposite Aaron Paul in Black Mirror and a recent cameo in The Bear—don’t put him anywhere close to the level of fame he underwent in the early aughts, when he was consistently cast in huge projects like Pearl Harbor and Black Hawk Down.

It sounds like that’s just the way he likes it. “I just didn’t want my life to be swallowed up by my work,” the actor, who now lives in the rural village of Hampshire, England full-time, recently told The Guardian. “There was a notion at that time you just kind of give it all up. And you saw what happened to some people back then. They got obliterated by it. I didn’t want that for myself.”

Harnett says he turned down the role of Superman twice. He was also in conversations with Christopher Nolan about a role in The Prestige (one that eventually went to Christian Bale) but “wasn’t much interested in playing Batman” in the director’s take on the franchise. But while the actor partly chalks up his recent return to “the rest of the industry sort of catching up with what I was always hoping to do,” his previous exit wasn’t inspired only by creative differences. At the height of his fame, there was no clear line between “happy Josh and unhappy Josh,” the actor said, explaining that “people’s attention to me at the time was borderline unhealthy.”

“There were incidents,” he continued, emphasizing that this was only one part of the multifaceted motivation behind his 18-month hiatus. “People showed up at my house. People that were stalking me,” he continued. “A guy showed up at one of my premieres with a gun, claiming to be my father. He ended up in prison… There were lots of things. It was a weird time. And I wasn’t going to be grist for the mill.” This happened 19 years ago, when the actor was 27 years old.

Even though Hartnett managed to find a way out of that awful situation without compromising his career entirely, younger stars are still contending with the very real price of fame every day. A few months ago, Miranda Cosgrove recalled a similarly horrifying experience with a crazed, gun-wielding stalker, while pop star Chappell Roan just opened up feeling the need to “pump the brakes” on her time in the public eye because “people have started to be freaks.” That’s not to mention the multiple people accused of stalking Taylor Swift over the years, including a man who was arrested at a Germany show for making threats against the singer and her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, on social media earlier this month. We’re once again begging for people to just be normal already, but if they can’t swing that, maybe Shyamalan’s elaborate trap isn’t such a far-fetched idea after all.