He made his feature film debut in 1998, co-starring with Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later for Miramax. Hartnett was active in sports as a child, especially football, and did not entertain the thought of becoming a performer, until an injury left him unable to participate on the athletic playing field. He had also worked at McDonald’s and Burger King for a short time before getting his start in acting at Youth Performance Company in Minneapolis. in 2002, he starred in O, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello set in an American high school, as Hugo, the film’s version of Iago.
