There's a reason Josh Hartnett keeps taking unexpected roles, from serial killer in Trap to a physicist in Oppenheimer: "It's hard to be surprised"

Pearl Harbour and Black Hawk Down star Josh Hartnett has had a bit of a career resurgence over the past few years. Tackling everything from a straight-laced physicist in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer to a serial killer hiding in plain sight in M. Night Shyamalan's Trap, the actor has been picking up some unique roles.

His latest choice is no different as the blonde-haired mercenary in new action movie Fight or Flight. Playing Lucas Reyes, Hartnett is a rogue agent brought back for a brutal mission: to find and locate a mysterious criminal on a flight. The only issue? The passenger list is full of assassins tasked with exactly the same thing.

It's a role that sees the actor doing his own stunts again for the first time in 20 years, and when he speaks about signing on, Hartnett tells GamesRadar+ he's always trying to do something different on screen.

"I've always been looking for diversity in my characters," he explains, "It just is working out now that I think not so much at the ingénue stage of my career, I'm being offered a lot more interesting, complex roles, and ones that are all over the map. And it's always been my intention to try to take myself out of being pigeon holed. So actually, as soon as I finished Oppenheimer, I went on to shoot this. They're very, very different characters. And then from there, I did The Bear and then Trap and I'm going to do a couple right now that are just completely different."

Next up for the actor is an adaptation of Colleen Hoover's beloved novel Verity with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson as well as James Franco's the star-studded The Long Home.

Hartnett adds: "Yeah, it's a goal of mine to kind of keep people guessing. I think it's more fun for me, but it's also more fun for the audience, because if they are interested in what I'm doing, maybe they don't know what they're going to be getting next. And I don't know, it's hard to be surprised these days. I still like that, I like to be surprised when I'm watching someone."

Fight or Flight arrives on Sky Cinema on February 28 in the UK and its US release date has not yet been announced. For more, read our Fight or Flight review as well as our interview features with Hartnett about his character's unique look and why the movie is an "anti-John Wick".