Josh Hartnett’s Verity casting makes Jeremy Crawford a suspect, not a crush

Josh Hartnett arrived at the London premiere of Verity, at the Curzon Mayfair, with his wife, the actor Tamsin Egerton, and gave the photographers what they came for: a kiss, her hand on his back, a wave to bring her into the couple shots. Entertainment Weekly called the appearance “swoon-worthy”. Planned or not, it was the most useful promotion the film has had, because Verity is a story about a devoted husband that spends two hours asking whether the devotion is real.

Hartnett plays Jeremy Crawford, husband of the bestselling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who is left unable to write after a car accident, and the man the struggling ghostwriter Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) falls for inside the family house. On BookTok, where Colleen Hoover’s novel found the readers who made it a phenomenon, Jeremy is often treated as the romantic prize. MCM’s argument is that casting an actor pushing fifty whose public image rests on being trustworthy moves Jeremy from crush to suspect, and that this is the adaptation’s sharpest decision, not a compromise.

That matters beyond fandom. Verity is a thriller about who gets believed: a mother’s confession, a husband’s grief or a lonely writer’s desire. The casting decides which of those stories the audience brings into the cinema, and anyone who has read the book, or is about to, is being asked to trust the wrong person at least once.

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Josh Hartnett’s goddaughter wanted a different Jeremy

Hartnett has been telling a story on the press tour that shows the gap. He told Entertainment Weekly that one reader was “absolutely not on board with me being Jeremy”: his 12-year-old goddaughter, who loves the book. “She was like, ‘You’re playing Jeremy? You’re like 100 years old,'” he recalled. Hathaway replied that it was “probably healthy” that a 12-year-old was not invested in the casting, and offered her own family review: “My father stopped reading the book.”

The anecdote is played for laughs, but it maps the fault line. For a large part of Hoover’s readership, Jeremy lives in the imagination as a figure of desire, the grieving father who is also the fantasy. The first audience reactions, collected by Screen Rant, show that the fantasy has not gone away. One four-star Letterboxd review, otherwise warm, still complained: “Josh Hartnett is not hot.”

Hartnett is 48. He has four children with Egerton, whom he met on the set of The Lovers in 2011 and married a decade later, and the family lives on a farm in Hampshire, in the south of England. “We have four kids, so it’s busy,” he told Entertainment Weekly on the carpet. “My life is my family life and every once in a while I come out and do something like this.” He added that he feels “much more at ease with all this stuff now than I used to.”

Why Hartnett’s public image is part of the plot

That quote is the public Hartnett in two sentences, and the image has held for twenty years. After The Virgin Suicides and Pearl Harbor made him a leading man, he turned down Superman and Batman, by his own later account because he did not want to commit a decade of his life to a franchise, and stepped back from a level of fame he has since described as “uncomfortable.” The story that followed, the actor who chose his life over his career and came back on his own terms, is the one audiences now attach to his face.

Verity needs exactly that story. The novel’s engine is a manuscript Lowen finds in Verity’s office, an autobiography in which the author confesses to thoughts no mother should put on paper, and a husband whose grief looks so complete that the reader wants to shield him from it. Hoover then gives the reader reasons to doubt the manuscript and, with it, everything the reader assumed about the husband. Hartnett described the problem to E! News after filming wrapped: “It’s kind of a perspective thing. You could go either way with it. I think it depends on who you listen to.” Asked whether Jeremy is the villain, he answered: “If you listen to Colleen, it’s not.”

An unknown actor would give the audience a blank page. Hartnett gives them a man they already like, and his recent work adds a second layer. In M. Night Shyamalan‘s Trap, he played Cooper Abbott, a father who takes his daughter to a pop concert and is also the serial killer known as the Butcher; the whole film ran on the distance between the dad in the crowd and the man in the news. Before that came Ernest Lawrence in Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer and a lead role in the Black Mirror episode “Beyond the Sea”. The Verity casting imports all of it: the family man on the Mayfair carpet and the family man with a secret.

The strongest case for a younger, simpler Jeremy Crawford

The fans’ objection deserves more than a joke. Hoover’s books sell on heat and on emotional clarity. A reader who stayed up all night with Verity arrives wanting the chemistry she imagined, and an adaptation that ages or complicates the love interest risks losing the audience that made the book a hit. Johnson herself sold the film to Reuters at the premiere as “so thrilling, it’s so sexy.” If an erotic thriller cannot deliver the desire, the argument goes, the ambiguity has nothing to hold on to, and a Jeremy who reads as a suspect from the first scene gives the twist away. The early reactions give that worry some support: Screen Rant described them as wildly divided, from Chloe Williams calling the film “an absolutely wild ride” to a Letterboxd user dismissing it as “gone girl from temu.”

There is a commercial version of the same argument. BookTok is the reason Verity exists as a studio film at all. Hoover self-published the novel in December 2018, and it reached mainstream shelves only after Grand Central Publishing reissued it in 2021, once TikTok readers had spent months recommending it in breathless short videos. The people who built that audience have a fair claim on the Jeremy they were promised.

Why the objection misreads Colleen Hoover’s thriller

Verity is not a romance, and the cast have been saying so. Johnson, speaking with Fandango’s Emily Orozco for Rotten Tomatoes, described the central relationship as unhealthy, a long way from the swooning Hoover adaptations audiences might expect. At the premiere she framed the film as a test of judgment: “You are constantly trying to figure out what the truth is and who the good people are and who the bad people are,” she told Reuters. Hathaway said in the same Rotten Tomatoes interview that she built two versions of Verity, one heightened as Lowen sees her and one grounded, so that viewers would question their own conclusions.

A thriller built to make viewers doubt their conclusions needs a man they would not think to doubt. A younger, simpler Jeremy makes the romance easier and the ending cheaper, because the audience’s suspicion never has to travel far. Hartnett’s Jeremy puts the viewer’s own assumptions on trial before a line is spoken. The goddaughter wanted a crush. Michael Showalter cast a husband.

None of this settles whether Hartnett is good in the role. MCM has not seen the film, and the reviews that will decide that are not yet in: Metacritic listed no critic scores at the time of writing. The claim here is narrower. The decision to cast him fits the story Hoover wrote better than the fan-cast version would have.

Verity’s release date and Hartnett’s October

Showalter directs from a script by Nick Antosca, and Verity opens in US cinemas through Amazon MGM Studios on October 2, 2026, with Sony Pictures Releasing International handling the international release. Six days later, on October 8, Hartnett leads Below, a Netflix series set in a Newfoundland fishing town. Two releases in a week will put a great deal of the family man in front of audiences, and the timing sharpens the test: the same face will be asked to earn trust on one screen and to question it on another.

The wider lesson is for an industry that now treats BookTok fan-casting as market research. Fan casting tells a studio who readers want to desire. It says much less about who a story needs the audience to believe. Verity is a useful case because the book itself is about the danger of believing the most comfortable version of events.

What is confirmed about Verity, and what is still open

Confirmed: the UK premiere took place at the Curzon Mayfair in London on September 24, 2026, with Hartnett, Egerton and Johnson on the carpet, while Hathaway did press in New York the same day, according to Just Jared. Hartnett plays Jeremy Crawford. His remarks about his goddaughter and his family life come from Entertainment Weekly, his view of Jeremy’s ambiguity from E! News, and Johnson’s premiere remarks from Reuters.

Still open: whether Jeremy is the villain of the novel, since Hoover’s position as Hartnett relays it is that he is not, while much of the readership disagrees; whether the split first reactions predict the critical verdict; and whether a 48-year-old Jeremy costs the film part of its core audience or sharpens it as a thriller. MCM’s reading is the last. Verity asks who you believe, and Josh Hartnett has spent twenty years getting audiences to believe him.

Tags: Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, Josh Hartnett, Book adaptations, Colleen Hoover, Verity

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