Less than 24 hours before the 74th annual Emmy Awards kicked off in Los Angeles, Nicholas Hoult was behind the wheel of a race car, speeding through the Sonoma Raceway in Northern California during the Ferrari Challenge. But on Monday afternoon, the star of The Great, who was nominated for Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for the Hulu show, found himself in an altogether different environment: the basement of L.A.’s Soho Warehouse Hotel, where he was preparing for television’s biggest night. (He didn’t stay on the West Coast for long—the next day, he flew back to London to continue filming season three of The Great.)
Despite all the movement, the British actor had a calm, laid-back outlook about the next few hours, which saw him getting ready to hit the red carpet in a ’70s-inspired Dior suit with a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch. “I didn’t even really think about today until yesterday, when I got off the track,” he tells me over the phone, adding that he is an automobile enthusiast. “Then suddenly, I was like, ‘Oh, the Emmys are tomorrow.’ Up until then, I had just been concentrating on the racing and driving.”
As Hoult tells it, finding out the news of his nomination had a similar relaxed vibe—and, incidentally, he was driving at the time, too. “I honestly forgot about it, until my phone started popping off a little bit,” he recalls. “I was like, what’s going on here?” He then called his partner, who revealed to him that he had been nominated. “I was like, ‘Hey! That’s good,’” he says.
After finding out his costar, Elle Fanning, had also snagged a nomination for Lead Actress, he got her on the horn—and ended up breaking the news. “Elle was actually filming that day,” he adds. “Normally, she doesn’t have her phone on her, but for some reason, that day, she did. I was like, A-ha! And I screamed congrats. She was like, ‘Wait, what?’ And I was like, You’re nominated!’ Then we both just screamed down the phone at each other for a second.”
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