Preparing for his role as Emperor Peter III of Russia in the TV show The Great, Nicholas Hoult wondered if he should go for the accent. The 31-year-old had just finished filming The Current War, a movie in which he played the inventor Nikola Tesla, and it struck him he could, without too much effort, repurpose his Serbian into a passable Russian. Hoult is thoughtful, conscientious, and takes his job very seriously. “It didn’t flow in the right way,” he says, of his stab at Russian, and back he went to the drawing board, specifically to an exaggerated version of his own accent. “I don’t go the full public schoolboy, but I’m very posh – educated but childish.” A new comic antihero was born.
Hoult is in London with his girlfriend Bryana Holly, an American model, and their two-year-old son Joaquin, in the midst of filming season two of The Great. It’s a terrific show, written by Tony McNamara – who also penned the Oscar-winning movie The Favourite, in which Hoult appeared alongside Olivia Colman and Emma Stone – and co-starring Elle Fanning as Catherine the Great. It’s riotously entertaining, and Hoult, as Peter III, is spoilt, impulsive, infantile and profane, a figure who will summarily execute or pardon on a whim. It is also very funny. Despite being a period piece, there is a vibe of The Thick Of It, mainly because of the amazing levels of swearing and Hoult’s indignant tyranny. His catchphrase – “huzzah!” – is the most benign thing about him.
For Hoult, the challenge was to make the character endearing as well as brutal. As an actor, he has ranged across every conceivable genre, from his title role in the 2017 indie biopic, Rebel In The Rye, to Nux in the blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road, Hank in the X-Men movies and his turn as Kenny in A Single Man, the gorgeous 2009 film by Tom Ford. Whatever the role, Hoult has about him a sort of guilelessness, the flashing grin and springy manner of someone who is, in his 30s, still perennially boyish. “He is horrible on so many levels,” he says of Peter, “but I think he still has to be fun to be around. You start off thinking, what a tyrant, what a monster – and then you see all the clues of what it’s like trying to rule a country in your father’s shadow. Having all these people around you who you don’t trust, and who never say no to you, and the effect of being able to do whatever you want. It has created this monster.”
Hoult may be describing the condition of modern celebrity, which for the past 20 years, he has tried very hard to resist. He was 11 when he played Marcus, the kid with the bowl haircut in the 2002 movie adaptation of About A Boy, Nick Hornby’s hit novel, at which point he had already been acting for six years. Hoult was the antithesis of the notional child star, a performer whose onscreen presence was neither cute nor self-conscious, but was largely unmannered, and characterised by a quietness – almost a reluctance – that has stayed with him.
Some of this may be down to his background. Hoult is from a village outside Wokingham in Berkshire, one of four children with a father who worked as a pilot, and a piano teacher mother. There were actors in his wider family; Hoult’s great-aunt, Anna Neagle, who died before he was born, was a popular English film actor of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. But it was a down-to-earth family and when (after following his sisters to ballet class and appearing in Swan Lake and The Nutcracker) Hoult was spotted by a casting director and invited to audition first for the stage, then for TV, he wasn’t particularly starry-eyed. In fact, he frequently found acting deeply embarrassing.
“Oh, completely: that’s acting in general,” he says, with a wolfish grin. At 6ft 3in, Hoult is a former teen basketball player for the Reading Rockets, with looks that are more cheeky upstart than conventional leading man. “The sweet spot is when you can be having enough fun in a character to not really care – so when things go wrong, you laugh it off and carry on. There has to be that element of not being precious, or worried about failing. And there’s nothing worse than being self-conscious while trying to be a character.”
In one episode of The Great that tested this ability, Hoult was required to walk the length of a long palace hallway, “pretty much buck naked. And I remember reading the script and saying, ‘Aaaaargh, Tony, I’m not sure about this one.’ Because that hallway is long and busy; the hallways are where people hang out and mingle in the palace. We had a debate about how many supporting artists would come in that day. It was originally 70 people in the corridor. I said, ‘Can we get it down to about 30?’” Eventually, he pulled himself together. “You have to switch off that part of your brain that’s saying, ‘I don’t want to walk down a corridor naked.’ You have to go: ‘All right. I’m Peter. And I feel so confident, and I’m so happy and enlightened, that I’m going to walk down this corridor naked. It’s an interesting trick to play on your brain.”
A lot of Hoult’s attitude towards work was set down in childhood, along with professional habits he has relied on since. Much of this was down to luck; if, after bit parts in shows such as Holby City, Silent Witness and Waking The Dead, he hadn’t scored his first big break opposite a star as disciplined as Hugh Grant, things might have turned out very differently. As it was, Hoult watched and learned from an actor who understood absolutely what it took to stay in the game. “I was only a kid when I worked with him, but he was so hard-working and diligent – neurotic, almost. I can remember him being very specific about beats on the set, and trying things and getting it right. I think you have to be.”
The two didn’t stay in touch much after the movie, but I imagine Hoult is enjoying Grant’s current success. He beams. “In my head, I’m thinking it’s a kind of Hughnaissance, or something. He had so much pressure on him [back then], and to see him free of that and just doing these wonderful dramas. I had so much fun watching him in Paddington 2, he was wonderful, and then in A Very English Scandal, and I’m about to start watching The Undoing. I’m enjoying what he’s doing at the moment, a lot.”
The pressure on Grant wasn’t lost on Hoult, even at 11, not least because it was a force he felt subject to himself. He was keenly aware of the cliche of the child actor, burnt out before he exits adolescence, and of the fact that unlike, say, young musicians, or sports stars, as an actor, his early success was considered a potentially irreversibly damaging experience. “Maybe it’s because the failure is more public, in terms of child actors, and everyone knows about the horror stories. For me, growing up, it was hard to have people say, ‘Oh, you’re a child actor, you know what that could potentially do to you?’ It does give you a little anxiety. But it’s also probably good to be aware of that. And there are certain things you can do to improve your chances of being lucky.”
One of these contingencies, says Hoult, was to rationalise that when he failed to win a role, it was more often than not nothing to do with his actual performance. “It’s not them saying, you weren’t a good enough actor; it’s them saying, we preferred this person, because they looked more like how we’d imagined the character. But it’s weird, to have people know that you go for things and sometimes don’t get them.” He sounds fleetingly like Ricky Gervais in The Office, trying to smile through a negative feeling.
He also defaults to another reliable consolation: that by missing out on something, it frees you up when something better comes along. “It all comes out in the wash, I suppose. There’s not a set path.” After making About A Boy, he went for a short time to the Sylvia Young theatre school, but quit to return to regular secondary school in Bracknell. It was partly, he says, because he was rubbish at singing and dancing, which made up so much of the Sylvia Young curriculum. But it was also a sense that “it was more important to go to a normal school”. At that stage, Hoult says, he wasn’t even sure he would carry on acting, and wanted to treat it more like a hobby – not least, he began to realise, because the best barometer of how well he performed was how much fun he had while doing it. “It wasn’t that formalised training wouldn’t work. But at the same time, some of the best actors I’ve worked with are very instinctive and, for me, the more fun I’m having, the more playful I am, the more I feel I’m probably in the right zone.”
It was also about trying out as many different types of production as he could. After making About A Boy, he was cast in Skins, the Channel 4 teen drama that ran to seven seasons, and in which Hoult appeared for the first two. He might have been marooned in adolescent drama for a lot longer had it not been for an experience that drove home how little control he had over his trajectory.
From a career standpoint, Hoult’s most pivotal movie was, arguably, A Single Man, the 2009 adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel. Directed by Tom Ford, Hoult’s performance as Kenny, a student whose gentle flirtation helps his grieving professor, played by Colin Firth, was as subtle and moving as anything in the film. It emphatically announced Hoult as a serious performer, introducing him to “a different tone, a different audience”, and more than able to hold the screen opposite Firth. And yet, he says, it might just as easily not have happened.
“That role was originally meant to be someone else,” says Hoult, “and I don’t know exactly what happened, but it didn’t work out. I got a phone call at 3am, and they said, ‘Can you get on a plane tomorrow and come and meet Tom?’ This was just after Skins. And I didn’t have a visa to work in the US, so they said, ‘We want you to do it, but you’ve got to go to Toronto to get your visa done in time. If it comes through by the end of the week, you can fly back and do the film. And if it doesn’t, you can’t.’” Had the chips fallen differently, it might have been years before Hoult had another equivalent chance and he was, he says, incredibly lucky. “Tom’s heart and soul went into that film, and his aesthetic eye is obviously incredible. Just to watch him was a big turning point.”
It is hard to imagine how making a film like A Single Man, so quiet and understated, compares with being on a superhero vehicle such as X-Men. Hoult joined the franchise in 2011, and has appeared in four of the movies. If the barometer for any of his performances is joy, one wonders where, in these staggeringly expensive juggernauts, that joy might seep in.
“It’s different,” says Hoult. “It depends on what the standpoint of having fun is. I can be having fun playing a ridiculous character in an enlarged fashion in a costume drama that’s not faithful to real history, and, bizarre as it is in many ways, that puts you in a very fun zone. Equally, I’m fine in a little drama where you’re very serious, because the fun is coming from just trying to get it right, and you feel like you’re trying to tell this story about something you care about. And X-Men is the fun in terms of when you were a kid and watched movies, and suddenly you’re on set, 10 years later, walking behind the person who you watched play Wolverine when you were a kid. And you’re like: this is mad.”
These career choices have been strategic. “It’s definitely a conscious thing. It’s also fortunate that people don’t know exactly where to put me. If I feel something is too close to what I’ve already done, I’ll try to mix it up.”
It’s true that Hoult continues to defy the exact mould of any particular genre, an indie actor who once dated Jennifer Lawrence, an action hero who, with comic brio, can play the lead in a sardonic TV show. He doesn’t have a home base, nor much idea of where he’ll be in six months’ time. “When people ask where I live, it’s kind of everywhere and nowhere. In two weeks’ time, someone could call and say, ‘Oh, this job shoots here for two years, can you go?’”
He remains able to withstand this kind of indeterminate schedule in part thanks to some stability of nature. Having his son in 2018 put everything more firmly into perspective. “I remember feeling I’ve got this new creative energy and power; I want to tell more stories, and do more, and be better, and to invest more when I’m at work, but then, also, when I step away from work, to have nothing to do with it.” When lockdown 1 happened, he was set to work long hours away from his family, and he embraced the cancellations with the same philosophy that has kept him sane since he first set foot on the red carpet aged 11: “I feel really grateful for losing out on those things.”
• The Great starts 3 January on Channel 4
