admin | Mar 15, 2024
admin | Mar 15, 2024
The actor also shares what it was like auditioning for the highly anticipated superhero movie.
Nicholas Hoult is sharing some insight into his preparations to play Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s upcoming Superman.
The actor stopped by the Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum podcast to chat about his acting career, including the highly-anticipated movie, which began production last week, per the director.
Hoult looked back at his time auditioning for the classic villain, saying Gunn has an “ability to keep things fun and alive and try things in the moment and be like, just shouting out from the monitors, ‘Say this line. Do this! Do that!’ And that’s something that I really enjoy. … That’s the whole process of prep for me is like, be prepared as possible so when you get there you can throw it all away and do whatever you want in the moment.”
As for the weeks leading up to filming, the Renfield actor also told the host that he began working out to play Lex.
“There’s that bit in All-Star Superman [comic book series] where he talks about his muscles being real and hard work and all that,” Hoult said. “I kind of took that as a little bit of fuel for the fire.” But he also noted that he doesn’t think the villain will have any shirtless scenes in the film.
Earlier in the podcast, Hoult revealed to Rosenbaum, who played a younger version of Lex on Smallville, that his iteration of the villain was the first time he saw Lex on screen.
“The first ever Lex I saw was you. Yeah, I grew up, Smallville was on,” the Warm Bodies actor said. “That was the show I would watch and see my first iterations of Superman and Lex and all those stories. I’ve since seen Richard Donner’s movies and all the other ones and kind of seen some of the other performances but you’re like the one. … It’s the best.”
At the end of February, Gunn shared a photo of the cast all together for the first time, noting that the image was taken after the first table read. Hoult appeared to be sporting a shaved head, gearing up to play Lex.
Gunn’s Superman, also starring David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, is set to be released on July 11, 2025. [Source]
admin | Nov 21, 2023
Nicholas Hoult has dipped his toes in every possible film genre, though horror has been his latest conquest. Most recently he portrayed Renfield in Chris McKay’s comedy-horror by the same name, where his character served as the henchman to Nicolas Cage’s Dracula. Prior to that, he excelled as Tyler in 2022’s The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod, starring alongside Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. He is certainly widely recognized as Peter III, emperor of Russia, from Hulu’s The Great, although they bid him farewell in the latest season. And if none of those ring the bells, millennials definitely know him as Tony Stonem from our childhood obsession over Skins.
Outside of film, Hoult is an ambassador for Jaeger-LeCoultre. Known for its innovation and creativity, the Swiss watch brand combines technical ingenuity with aesthetic beauty and understated sophistication to create the finest timepieces. To celebrate the opening of Reverso Stories, brand ambassadors Lenny Kravitz, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Nicholas Hoult took part in an elegant NYC soiree. On view now, the immersive exhibition explores the creative universe of watch design over the past 90 years.
FLAUNT joined in the celebration and sat down with Hoult to chat about craft and craftsmanship.
Tell me a little bit more about your relationship and partnership with Jaeger-LeCoultre.
My relationship with Jaeger started at the Venice Film Festival. They’ve sponsored the festival for many years. I am not allowed to talk about specific films at the moment, because of the strike, but I was there with a film and Jaeger reached out and mentioned wanting to lend me a watch to wear to the premiere, and that was the beginning of the relationship. I know people always say these things grow organically, but for a few years in a row I had movies at the festival, and I would meet and spend time with the Jaeger family there, and then they asked me to participate and be an ambassador for them.
Yes, you’ve been starring in their campaigns as an ambassador for a few years now. What makes their watches, in particular, The Reverso, so special?
It always comes back to the history and the craftsmanship of them. And also, the creativity of it, the artistry, and the talent of the people at the manufacture. It’s all those things combined. And that’s a very special feeling to try to capture. The watches feel good, they look beautiful, and there’s also this thing with Jaeger-LeCoultre, where people that are real fans of watchmaking really love and understand who they are and what they do, and it’s not just a symbol of monetary wealth, but it’s a much more artistic development, and a symbol of creativity.
And they are constantly innovating. They are always creating new timepieces, like the one I am wearing now, The Reverso. So it’s exciting for me to get closer to the process and get to see the work behind the piece. This is only the second time ever they’ve created a Reverso Chronograph, which also, for me, is something purely aesthetic, as I love having the skeleton case because you can really see all the inner workings of the watch.
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admin | Jun 23, 2023
Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult could hardly maintain their composure while shooting their final scenes together on “The Great.” For three seasons on the anti-historical Hulu dramedy series, the Emmy-nominated actors, who first worked together in the 2014 sci-fi film “Young Ones,” have gone toe-to-toe as Empress Catherine the Great and Peter III of Russia.
Although they have survived more than most couples — she staged a successful coup against him and nearly stabbed him to death, whereas he slept with and accidentally killed her mother — Catherine and Peter’s deep-seated animosity belies a growing affection that neither is able to fully articulate until just moments before one of them meets an untimely (and icy) end in the latest season. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know those details.
“I think we can both appreciate that it was so special to get to play these characters and be in those scenes together,” Hoult says. “Knowing that it was the last time we’d get to do that was very difficult.”
On a recent video call — Fanning from Los Angeles and Hoult from Calgary — the co-stars discussed the evolution of Catherine and Peter’s relationship and their plans to work together again in the future.
Catherine and Peter have taken the ups and downs of a married couple to the nth degree, but they seem to arrive at a place of reconciliation this season.
Fanning: I think Catherine says a line early on this season, “For us to move forward, we have to leave the past behind.” But the past inevitably always does creep back. The outside influence of the court and the ghost of his father are telling him that being a good father isn’t enough, which is quite sad, and that he needs to have some huge, powerful legacy and have done something like win a war. I think if it wasn’t for those outside forces gnawing at Peter, they probably would be OK. If they were just on a desert island together, they would probably want to kill each other at times — like a “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” situation — but they do always inevitably come back together and love each other in the end.
Hoult: You’ve struck the nail on the head, because that’s what’s fun about this season. It’s this breakdown of, “How much baggage is too much? How can you rebuild trust and love after terrible things have happened?” And I think, ultimately, Catherine and Peter get each other enough where they could [move on], and it’s actually the environment around them that prevents them from finding happiness.
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admin | May 16, 2023
Warning: Major spoilers for The Great season three ahead.
As ghastly as King Peter’s death is in the middle of The Great’s third season, it could’ve been even more jarring. “I was shocked by the Succession one,” Nicholas Hoult tells Vanity Fair of Logan Roy’s onscreen demise. “I was like, Oof. At [episode] three.”
It’s not until episode six that Hoult’s Peter meets his end, falling through the ice amidst an ill-advised invasion of Sweden. Moments before his fateful fall, Elle Fanning’s Catherine pleads with her husband to abort the mission and return to his place as primary caretaker of their newborn son, Paul. Peter refuses her proposal, but packages his rejection within a lovesick monologue. “There are many versions of you, and you know I’m the only one who sees them all,” he tells Catherine. “And you know I love them all—even when I find them baffling and idiotic. I just ask the same of you.… You think I am destroying us, and I know I am saving us.”
Alas, Peter proceeds across a frozen lake on horseback, turning to say “Actually—” before plummeting to his death. It’s an inevitable conclusion for the character, who is plagued by visions of both his dead father (played by Jason Isaacs) and an adult version of his son. The season balances “this idea that he has actually found happiness in somebody, and then this creeping idea of how people judge you and how Paul will grow up to think of him,” Hoult explains. “These tiny seeds get planted that grow into this idea of him not being good enough as a leader, as a man, as a father—how people will view him after his death, and what his life amounts to.”
While Hoult’s exit from the Hulu series provides him ample time to invest in his film career (commitments to The Great prevented him from accepting the villain role in the upcoming Mission: Impossible movie, and he’s reportedly circling the lead role in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy), the actor isn’t quite ready to let go of Peter’s ghost. “I’ve never experienced anything quite like it,” he says of the series. “I’ve never enjoyed playing a character as much and experienced and grown so much in my personal life outside of it. I don’t think I’ll ever experience anything like it again.”
Ahead, Hoult looks back at his “bizarre” reign, including time spent playing Pugachev, and discusses whether he’d be down to do some season four haunting.
Vanity Fair: Given history, people have assumed that Peter would die at some point. But when did you know how and when his death would go down?
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admin | Apr 26, 2023
The star of not one but two hot vampire films talks lockdown, eating caramel cockroaches and why he wants to make a romcom
In Renfield, a comedy slasher about Dracula’s lickspittle victim, Nicholas Hoult eats insects for his super-strength, which is prodigious. He decapitates and disarms with ease, his eyes flash amber as his power grows, but otherwise he plays it with a self-effacing British charm so pure that it’s like watching Hugh Grant rebooted.
In a hotel in central London to talk about the film, he looks – well, first of all, weirdly young. His breakthrough role, in 2002, was Grant’s titular co-star in About a Boy, though he appeared in his first film, Intimate Relations, six years before that, when he was five. So, he has now been in the business for nearly three decades, but, at 33, he has not just the face, but also the self-effacing manners, of someone much younger, as if he’s living his own, personal vampire story and got bitten by a svengali a century ago (or maybe by Grant in About a Boy?).
Renfield is a mischievous, expectation-reversing caper, which I found unbelievably bloody and disgusting. “It is quite gory,” he says, mildly. “Was it too much?” Well, to be fair, while I was hiding in my polo neck and muttering “No, please, make it stop”, everyone else in the audience was laughing. So this is obviously a sensibility thing.
“If I’m watching a film where it’s more realistic, that affects my psyche a lot more. Whereas an arm getting ripped off, blood spurting, a head getting punched off – we’re not living in the real world any more. This is ridiculous. I can see why people would be squeamish, but for me, I don’t have that reaction. I have more of a ‘this is silly’.”
Plus, the bugs he had to eat were mainly sweets. “We had cockroaches made of caramel. They were great. The worms were gummy worms in crushed-up Oreos to look like earth. Only the crickets were real.”
He talks about the project with a detached affection, as if he’s reviewing a theme park for TripAdvisor, but he has thought about its dynamics really hard – what Renfield would really be like, 100 years into his surrender to evil, what’s going on with Nicolas Cage’s Dracula, which is honestly droll, so mannered and self-referential, but also so committed, as if Dracula himself had read about Cage, and thought: “Wow, that guy sounds like a badass, maybe I should be more like him.”
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admin | Mar 29, 2023
Nicholas Hoult talks about one of his scenes from The Menu becoming a meme, shares how he surprisingly won a bronze medal in discus and discusses working with Nicolas Cage in the film Renfield.
admin | Mar 29, 2023
Actor Nicholas Hoult is taking on the title character in the new horror-comedy movie “Renfield” where he plays a longtime servant to Count Dracula, who is played by Nicolas Cage. He also talks about having to eat bugs on set — and then tries barbecue crickets with Al Roker!
admin | Mar 24, 2023
With over two decades of work, Nicholas Hoult has cemented his place in the spotlight. Now, with not one but two vampire films in the works, the actor dives into the world of the undead.
Despite what his filmography might suggest—starring as a lovesick zombie in 2013’s Warm Bodies; reuniting with former The Weather Man costar Nicolas Cage to play Dracula’s beleaguered assistant in Renfield, out this April; and playing an as-yet-unnamed character in Robert Eggers’s upcoming Nosferatu remake, currently shooting in Prague—Nicholas Hoult promises that he does not have an obsession with the undead. He just happened to be offered two exciting scripts centered on vampires.
“With Renfield, I thought it was a fun take because Renfield is normally a secondary character, and I was like, ‘How fun to explore these codependent, toxic relationships in this scenario—a work environment between Dracula and his familiar,’” Hoult explains.
And besides, with over two decades of experience under his belt, he’s sure to repeat a motif or two. Hoult first made waves in 2002’s About a Boy, but it was his role as Tony Stonem on the iconic U.K. series Skins back in 2006 that officially put him on the map. Since then, Hoult has appeared in everything from big-title blockbusters, like X-Men and Mad Max: Fury Road, to more experimental fare, like 2018’s critically acclaimed period drama The Favourite and 2022’s sleeper hit The Menu.
The role that has garnered him the most attention to date, however, is playing Russia’s Peter III in Hulu’s The Great, which has earned him two Golden Globe nominations and one Emmy nomination. He stars alongside Elle Fanning in the comedy-drama series—and, exclusively for L’OFFICIEL. Hoult speaks with his friend and costar about picking up diverse skills beyond acting on set, dealing with having scenes cut, and working with iconic actors as a child.
NICHOLAS HOULT: I would like to start with something that I think will make Elle laugh: Guess what I’m doing at the moment? I’m practicing my calligraphy. I’ve got my quill here, my ink. It’s going terribly, as always. This goes back to when we were shooting The Great, and there was a scene where I had to sign over Russia to Catherine. Behind the scenes, I guess I was meant to have been practicing my penmanship, my quillwork, because I’m truly terrible at it. And I said to Elle in between takes, “Oh, because you’re so good at it.” And she was like, “No, really I am,” and I was like, “BS, it’s so difficult. What’s going on here?” Turns out, Elle had calligraphy lessons when she was a kid, and writes out the Russian word for Catherine in the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen in my life.
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