Josh Hartnett modelled his sinister serial killer in M. Night Shyamalan film Trap after certain ‘people in our business.’
The 46-year-old actor stars in the Split director’s latest project as Cooper, a father taking his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to a concert to see beloved pop icon Lady Raven (played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka).
However, when he notices something seems amiss with the gig, it transpires the entire show is a sting operation to take down The Butcher, his homicidal alter ego.
Ahead of the film’s UK release on August 9, the Pearl Harbor star explained he looked at ‘people who are at the top’ for inspiration on his character’s cold-blooded ruthlessness.
‘There are a lot of CEOs, politicians, people in our business… a lot of people who are at the top,’ he told Entertainment Weekly.
‘They don’t mind stepping over people or doing horrible things to get where they’re going, and not having any empathy is a pretty big sign of being a psychopath.
‘Whether or not you’re murdering people, I’ve met people like this, you know what I mean? So it was easy to take it all a step further, make it a little bolder, and make his cover so intense.’
Josh also praised Shyamalan – famed for films such as The Sixth Sense and Signs – for making a film that allowed the audience to empathise with his killer character.
‘Night being Night, he wants to give the audience a new experience,’ Hartnett continued.
‘He’s been doing this his entire career. He’ll take a ghost story and tell it from the point of view of the ghost. He’ll take an alien invasion story and not really show the aliens.
‘So this one is like a throwback thriller in a contained space from the perspective of the antagonist. It’s like Die Hard from Hans Gruber’s perspective.’
The psychological thriller debuted with a poor showing of only 46% on film rating site Rotten Tomatoes, which is Shyamalan’s worst result in half a decade when he scored 37% for Split’s 2019 sequel, Glass.
Speaking to The Playlist, Shyamalan expanded on the initial inspiration behind the idea which originally came from conversations with his daughter about music.
‘[I felt] that she’s one of the rare people who could write an album for a narrative., not like when inspiration strikes you, but intentionally,’ he said.
‘Like “Can you write a fictional character and write this many songs for it in a timetable?” And we can make a narrative around it. And then I said, “What about a thriller with music?” And so it just evolved from that into the movie [you see].’