The aspect of his career Aaron Eckhart “always regrets”
With a jawline that looks like it was chiselled out of granite, his all-American energy, and matinee idol looks, Aaron Eckhart felt destined to become a major star when he first broke out in the 2000s, even if things didn’t quite end up that way.
He was solid in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday and Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brokovich at the turn of the millennium, but it wasn’t until Jason Reitman’s scathing corporate satire Thank You For Smoking that he was allowed to showcase his leading man credentials to a wide audience.
When he did, his turn as suave snake oil salesman and tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor earned him a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’, before his performance as Harvey Dent in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight elevated his star to another level.
He never managed to capitalise on that momentum to the extent many were prognosticating at the time, with Eckhart becoming an increasing fixture in the straight-to-video action thriller market, where in recent years he’s partnered up with a dog in Muzzle, been livestreamed solving a kidnapping in Line of Duty, and taken up bareknuckle boxing in Rumble Through the Dark.
That doesn’t mean he’s been left shaking his fist and cursing the gods of Hollywood for failing him, but Eckhart has nonetheless been left with one major regret that he’s carried with him throughout multiple films. At the end of the day, he gets paid to say the lines written on the script, but if he had it his way, he’d never use profane language on-screen.
“There’s a better way to say it, a more colourful way to say it, or a smarter way to say it than swearing,” he said to the BBC of his aversion to foul-mouthed verbiage, which he admitted he’ll “always regret” after he drops a curse word. “I know people swear in real life, but I just think the movies have a responsibility.”
Putting his reluctance down to a rigid moral compass, in an ideal world, Eckhart would “like the whole family to be able to go see the movie because I think movies have so much to give.” Unfortunately, whenever a screenplay dictates that he tell someone to fuck off, that goes right out of the window.
It’s nothing if not curious that Eckhart would name swearing as the biggest regret of his career, when this is the same actor who attended a support group for bereaved parents in preparation for the drama Rabbit Hole and pretended that he was in their position, despite having no children of his own in real life.
That’s an infinitely more regrettable act than dropping a few sweary tirades, but apparently, Eckhart’s moral compass does not extend to deciding that fabricating a dead child was unnecessary.
