Nicholas Hoult opened about his fear of succumbing to the fate of child actors after his break out role in the 2002 Hugh Grant dramedy About a Boy, revealing that “everyone [back] then, even as a kid, everyone talks to you about how child actors stop working, their life goes off the rails and [how] it doesn’t work out as adults. You have this kind of fear of what’s to come.”
The 36-year-old British actor reflected on his almost three decade career as a mainstream star during a “In Conversation With” talk event at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah on Monday.
Hoult began the talk by detailing his childhood, revealing that he lived in a household that loved musical theater and acting. He briefly talked about his first audition as a 5-year-old for Philip Goodhew’s 1996 film Intimate Relations and then talked about his time working on Paul and Chris Weitz’s About a Boy as an 11-year-old. After confessing his fears of making it in the business despite the good notices for his performance in the Nick Horby adaptation, Hoult said that the talk around him at the time, and being aware of the failure some child actors did play on his mind. “Even then I knew I wanted to continue [acting] but I was like there’s a good chance this doesn’t work out,” he said before adding, “Luckily my parents and my family were wonderful in the sense of they sent me to a normal school and kept life around acting as regular as possible, so there was never like this pressure to succeed.”
In About a Boy, Hoult starred alongside Toni Collette, the Aussie actress who played his character’s mother. Hoult remarked on the “special” nature of meeting Collette as a child, and working with her again twenty years later. “She played my mum in [About a Boy], and then we did a movie two years ago called Juror No. 2, that Clint Eastwood directed. It was lovely to reunite with her. These people that have known me since I was a kid, but now I’m a completely different person. Now I get to know them again as an adult, which is really special.”
The talk moved on to Hoult’s time on the revolutionary British teen TV drama Skins, the show that launched the careers of a dizzying number of now established actors including Daniel Kaluuya, Dev Patel, Jack O’Connell, Hannah Murray, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Kaya Scodelario and Joe Dempsie. Hoult had just missed Kaluuya at Red Sea Film Festival by a few days and remarked that “one of the wonderful things about Skins is that I made some of my best friends for life from that show.”
Describing his Skins character Tony Stonem as a “piece of work”, Hoult reflected on his time working on the show fondly. “We all were like 16 or 17-years-old, living away from home for the first time in Bristol. We grew up together. No one expected that show would take off the way it did. It was the first drama that was made for [the Channel 4 youth orientated channel E4]. The script was great, it was a good team but no one expected it to [be so big]. What was unique about it was that we all went in with no expectations, we were just having fun.
On his move into franchise acting, Hoult reveals the quirk of fate that led him to be securing the role of Beast in in Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 hit X-Men: First Class. “One of the things that led to [playing Beast] was Tom Ford’s first movie A Single Man. After that I was actually cast in Mad Max, but we had to delay the filming because we were meant to shoot in Australia but we had to move it to Namibia. So then I called my agents and said I needed a job. And they said there was interest in you playing Beast in X-Men. I had to do an audition for that for that in Australia the next day, and I jumped on the plane for a screen test and it all worked out.”
Once again reminding people how young he actually is despite his seemingly veteran status as a mainstream star, Hoult said he grew up watching the X-Men movies and loved the comics. He shared one particularly “crazy” moment for him on the set of 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past. “I was in the Cerebro corridor with James McAvoy playing Xavier, and then I looked over and it was Hugh Jackman as Wolverine [standing there]. I was [thinking] this is the guy that I was watching play Wolverine when I was 11-years-old and now I’m standing next to him and you know it was really like an out of body experience, a bit like tripping. It was really bizarre, it’s like ‘oh I’m reliving my childhood, but in real time.’”
Asked if he felt was now famous and receiving attention from fans after starring in a huge franchise like X-Men, Hoult quipped that “for those [films] I was mostly covered in blue fur. So it wasn’t like walking down the street and people were like ‘there’s that guy!’ But the comic fans are really supportive and caring and they’re passionate.”
Moving on to his acclaimed performance in George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road, Hoult described working on the project as “the strangest experience, right from the audition.” He said that his audition lasted four hours and that he and his scene partner did one scene where they were playing observation games, doing repetitive tasks and physical activities. “It was like theater training and I left the audition thinking, even if I don’t get this movie, that’s been one of the best experiences I’ve had as an actor.”
Hoult described Miller as “so creative and intelligent” and reflected on the deafening Fury Road shoot in Namibia. “[A lot of it was practical] so you couldn’t hear anything. They’d give the signal to start up the engines and the vehicles and for 20 or 30 minutes we would cross the desert filming and occasionally you’d see a camera fly by like on another truck or something and you’d just be like doing scenes, not really hearing them and wondering what was happening.”
He added that, “George has got such a wonderful vision. There wasn’t a script, it was like a comic book that he had… A week or two into filming, I was completely in awe of the whole experience and I said to George, ‘you’ve been wanting to make this movie for 17 years, how do you feel now you’re here?’ And he said, ‘it’s very special to be here but at the same time [I can’t] get carried away with my love for the project. The people that go to the theater [to watch this] in two years time, they’re not coming in with this investment in the story [that I have], you still need to create that for them.’ Which I thought was a really smart [thing to say].”
On his recent work on James Gunn’s Superman, Hoult spoke about auditioning to play the Man of Steel initially but as he read the script, he realized that he could really see himself playing Lex Luthor instead. “The first time I read the script, I remember reading the Lex scenes and thinking these are interesting. ‘I might actually be better at that than Superman,’ but I was like, well don’t say that to anyone now whilst you’re auditioning for Superman [laughs].”
“My brain was like, yes, that’s the character [Lex] you should and need to be playing because there were just moments in the dialogue and the script where I thought that it’s really delicious. A man like this, he is definitely very much the villain of that story, but at the same time, there’s this thing where if you unpack things you could piece together what his motivations are and see that there is a different angle to this. It could make sense, even though [Lex] is misguided and his approach is awful, it’s terrible.”
Hoult said he loved working with Gunn on Superman, saying “I really trusted him. We went through the rehearsals and and he’d say like ‘this isn’t working, let’s try this, let’s do that,’ and so it was explorative in the sense of developing the character together.” The actor revealed that his research for the film included Brian Azzarello’s comic series Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, as well as watching the original Christopher Reeves Superman movies and the recent Reeves documentary Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. He added that he was excited to play Lex as he was following in the footsteps of Gene Hackman, one of his all-time favorite actors.
Later, during an audience Q&A session, Hoult was asked which director he would like to work with. He said he was keen to work with Red Sea Film Festival competition jury president Sean Baker. “I think he is a wonderful [filmmaker], Florida Project, Red Rocket, I think he’s making really special movies.” Hoult also cited Quentin Tarantino, and joked that he “wouldn’t say no” to working with fellow Brit Christopher Nolan.
Hoult was also asked whether he would consider directing, and he was clear that he wasn’t interested right now, as he knew the job of a director was “extremely hard.” But he confessed that he idly imagined he might be able to tell a certain story in his way, but for the moment he wanted to concentrate on acting.
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