Pearly shrine to all things Josh

You know you're getting on a bit when an actor professes that his idol is Ethan Hawke. Last time I checked, Hawke was still trying to cultivate a bum-fluff goatee - though someone tells me he's since married Uma Thurman and they've got eight kids or something. You know you're really old when the actor in front of you has been linked romantically to Kirsten Dunst, no longer, apparently, the seven-year-old girl from Interview With A Vampire. So maybe it's just me.

I know these facts because I have just logged on to a website called 'Hartnett Heaven', smothered in pink love hearts and suchlike, and one of several virtual shrines devoted to all things Josh. 'Josh loves jazz music and calls himself a poet,' it proclaims. His favourite thing in the whole world is his 'blue knit cap'. He spends his time 'perfecting his smile'. And heavens, he auditioned for the lead role in Dawson's Creek six times 'but never got it!'

Feeling grubbily like John Hurt in Love And Death On Long Island, whose Giles De'Ath became unhealthily preoccupied with the doings of teen idol Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley), I log off. Though there is plenty more to learn about our Josh yet.

As an old American TV show once said, 'There are a million stories in the Naked City.' There are also a million Josh Harnetts in Hollywood - certainly several thousand. You know, the archetypal brooding, pretty boy actor, with the requisite rite-of-passage background: a humble upbringing (preferably the Midwest), a half-arsed stab at drama school, who does some modelling, gets a part in a couple of slasher films, and waits to see how the dice tumble. For most, once the beer gut hits and the hair starts to go, it can offer a career asking Sir if he'd like fries with his burger. Others - Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey and, yes, Ethan Hawke - rise above the mire. There is probably little, talent-wise, to separate them from those who were at the wrong audition on the wrong day. But such is life. Hooray for Hollywood.

For Hartnett, though, the day of reckoning is nigh. In a sumptuous hotel on Waikiki Beach, Honolulu, where he's jetted in for the premiere of his new movie, Pearl Harbor, he is studiously 'chilled'. 'Hey man,' says Hartnett, pumping your hand then removing his cotton sun hat, one of those floppy-brimmed, bad-boy punk things that Eminem (and wicket-keepers) wear. 'How's it goin'?' As star of this mega-budget, all-exploding bomb-fest, and in spite of the quality of the film ? which is being torpedoed as we speak, not that it'll affect the box office - Hartnett, 22, should revel in his last days of freedom. Just as Leonardo DiCaprio was suddenly thrust beneath the spotlight's glare after Titanic, so Hartnett will suddenly find himself a global star. Reluctantly, of course. For it is the duty of his ilk to profess that fame is a curse. They just want to act, man. 'I don't have to change the way I live,' he says, all pained dark eyes and furrowed brow. 'After you've met somebody for two minutes, you don't think of them as what you saw in two dimensions on a piece of a paper. You think of them as a normal person, so I don't think that will affect me too much.'

Though Hartnett will have little say in the matter. As buffed-up fighter pilot, Danny ('just get me to a goddamn plane') Walker, Hartnett emerges from Pearl Harbor to greater acclaim than official name-above-the-title Ben Affleck. He also gets Affleck's girl (nurse Kate Beckinsale) in the amateurish bit of drama that leads up to the big explosions. 'The burden of hunkery - bringing in the younger girls - fell to Josh,' sighs Affleck. 'Let Josh take his shirt off. Let Josh run around covered in grease. He'll reap the benefits in terms of the scores of teenagers who'll be camped outside his house.'

Hartnett didn't want to do the part at first, though. Hell, he didn't even know what Pearl Harbor was. 'I've never been a war buff. I'm a, you know, peace and love buff,' he mumbles. 'Yeah, I didn't really know much about it then [the Pearl Harbor attack], but after I signed on, I learned an awful lot about it.' But after talking it over with his father while they washed the car (what a down-home dude), and speaking to some Pearl Harbor survivors ('It kind of lent a heart and soul to the character'), he took the plunge. Come the end of the summer, you may find it hard to remember when Hartnett was ever an unknown.

So who is Josh Hartnett? Sofia Coppola, who directed him in last year's Virgin Suicides, said he was 'born to be a movie star'. Tall (6ft 4in), intense and brooding in that slacker kind of way, his trademark mop of hair, clumps of which seem to belong to someone else altogether, has been shorn into a military buzz-cut - courtesy of Black Hawk Down, another war film he's currently shooting in Morocco, about the US Marines caught up at Mogadishu. 'Not really a war movie,' he corrects. 'It's kind of a modern morality tale.'

Hailing from St Paul, Minnesota, and dropping out of college, he headed west to mine Tinseltown's mother lode. Though, to his credit, once he hit the big time, he retreated back home, winging into Tinseltown only when necessary. 'I'm still part of the industry, just in a different way,' he says. 'I don't feel a need, when I get back from a movie set, to go right back into the movie business. It's over-saturation. I'd rather go home and see my family and friends.'

Such a Boho too. After learning of a fellow actor who went to Cannes laden with 30 suitcases, Joshie never travels with anything more than a backpack.