There are a lot of things that I completely get others feel equate with being from the U.S. This includes but is not limited to: corn fields, wearing dumb American flag shorts on the Fourth of July, people assuming one eats pizza and burgers for every single meal, driving pretty much everywhere, and gun ownership. Listen I get it, it’s easy to boil down a population to five or ten general identifiers, but as someone who is now living with his British wife and four kids in Southeast England, Josh Hartnett recently joked about getting roasted by his own kids for being an American. Only, as an American, I did not get this lawn comment.
So, here’s what happened. Josh Hartnett was appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon when the late night host asked him about moving away from the U.S., he told a funny story about how his daughters handle the fact he's not British like them. Spoiler: they are brutal with the dad roasts.
I’m a foreigner in my own home. And so my girls – my middle one does a really good impersonation of me. You know, will just kind of turn to me and be like [in an American accent], ‘I’m Daddy and I like pizza and I won’t mow the lawn.’ Exactly, as American as it gets, right?
I do know a few people who have hired out lawn services, but where I'm from that is definitely not even close to the average person, and I'm super surprised that's a trope his kids latched onto and that Hartnett is acting like this is just super common? I for a second considered this comment was more about the British lawn than the American lawn, but I'm still not in the loop here.
Hartnett’s been in England for a long time. He met wife Tamsin Egerton all the way back in 2012, and moved to the country shortly thereafter, and he previously spoke about exiting Hollywood on purpose at the height of his fame. It sounds like cutting out a lot of the noise was good for him and his family, even if he doesn’t land all the respect from his kids.
He went on to explain his younger daughter can be even more condescending about the fact he’s not English, and the story is too cute.
And then my littlest daughter keeps telling me what it’s like to be English. Like she keeps saying to me like, ‘You may not understand this Daddy, but in England we say ‘boot’ instead of ‘trunk’ of a car.’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve lived here for longer than you. I made you!’
Josh Hartnett did recently spend some time back in the States filming the upcoming Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, which is set to hit the release schedule in 2026. I doubt he was mowing any lawns during this time, though.
Listen, I get some of these tropes aren’t absolute. Most Americans drive everywhere, but I know multiple people who live in Chicago or New York and who don’t drive, period. The lawn thing is probably some coastal thing people of means employ, though Hartnett is originally from Minnesota, where I’d assume a huge swathe of people are still mowing their own dang lawns.
Here in my neighborhood in a suburb of St Louis, I have one neighbor who lives across the street who does employ a lawn service. However, my other four close neighbors would consider their lawns to be a point of pride. In fact, my husband has a little unspoken thing going on with the house next door where one of them is always trying to make sure their grass looks more immaculate than the other's. If my husband is out mowing the lawn at 10 a.m. on a Saturday, you can bet our neighbor's yard will be handled by the end of the same day.
I guess the moral of the story here is that, yes, things are different in the U.K. and the U.S., but things are also different if you live in different places within those countries. Now, excuse me while I brew some sweet tea and watch my husband engage in the total American past time of using the lawnmower.
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