Josh Hartnett: I Was Once Accused of Grand Theft Auto!

USMagazine, Thursday, March 8, 2012, 1:44pm (PST)

Josh Hartnett is a wanted man in more ways than one!

The actor, who's currently dating Amanda Seyfried, was arrested for allegedly stealing a car while shooting The Faculty in 1998 -- but according to Hartnett, it was all a big misunderstanding.

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"The cops who pulled me over typed in the vehicle identification number wrong, so they arrested me for stealing a car," Hartnett, 33, tells BULLETT's Spring issue. "[Director] Robert Rodriguez and [then-wife] Elizabeth Avellan came down to bail me out of the Austin county jail in the middle of the night so that I could work the next morning."

Harnett didn't show up for the trial "because it was so ridiculous," and as a result, "they put a strike on my record."

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"If I get arrested twice more, or get convicted of anything twice more in Texas, I'm getting the electric chair, or whatever they do now -- lethal injection?"

Hartnett tells BULLETT that "we had so much fun -- maybe too much fun" working on the horror movie, which also starred Salma Hayek, Elijah Wood, Usher and Jordana Brewster.

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"I'd been doing a TV show [Cracker] in L.A. after six months of being in art school, so I was basically just out of the house. I hadn't yet read the script when I went in for my first meeting -- I'm sure it was available, but I was young and I didn't give a sh-t, and I think Robert Rodriguez loved that. He said to me after I was cast, 'I was looking for the coolest kid in school, and you just didn't seem to care at all.'"

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