With all due respect to Nicholas Hoult, but why did he ever think he could play Superman? James Gunn’s reboot of DC’s most beloved hero has garnered strong reviews, particularly for the spot-on casting of David Corenswet as Clark Kent. He seems like he was bred in a lab for the part, so charming and cornfed and exuding earnestness that he could have done this role in his sleep. His hair even curls in the right place. So, it’s fascinating to know that Hoult auditioned for the part before being offered the chance to play the villainous Lex Luthor. Surely, he always made more sense as the bad guy, the powerful but petty businessman who would rather let the world burn than admit defeat. After all, this was an actor born for freak mode.
There are few things in pop culture I love more than when a conventionally handsome actor who was primed to be a leading man decides to embrace their inner goblin. I want to see every hot dude be their most squirrelly and off-putting self in strange character actor roles where you question their sanity. Think of Sebastian Stan in A Different Man or Robert Pattinson in practically everything. I want to hear bananas accents and see the most artfully crafted mental breakdowns this side of a Cassavetes movie. Men want one thing and that’s to be Willem Dafoe.
Nicholas Hoult has amassed an impressive array of weird little guy credits. In Mad Max: Fury Road, he played a sickly war boy with the enthusiasm of a sugared-up toddler who had access to a car, embodying the infantile zealotry of Immortan Joe’s goons in an apocalyptic nightmare. As the real-life Robert Harley in Yorgos Lanthimos’s bone-dry historical dramedy The Favourite, he acts like a cartoon fop who thinks he’s more important than he is. In a film where all of the power players are men, Hoult is essentially the himbo, albeit one who acts like Hedonism Bot from Futurama. To play a zombie in Warm Bodies , Hoult took inspiration from Tim Burton films and practiced the shambling physicality of the undead with acrobats from Cirque du Soleil. The end result was a charming and remarkably restrained performance that avoided genre cliches but was still extremely funny. He’s not the king freak in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, but his version of Thomas Hutter/Jonathan Harker is anxiety personified, that rare instance of a guy in a vampire movie who knows he’s stuck in hell from the moment he arrives.
Hoult is a couple of steps ahead of his contemporaries in terms of freak mode experience. Even before he was spray-painting his teeth and suggestively rubbing his staff, he was primed for freak mode. As a child actor, Hoult played cute but uncanny kids who were wiser than their years and a bit off-putting because of it. In his adolescence, Hoult headlined the first two seasons of Skins, a controversial teen drama that beguiled my generation of adolescence with its no-holds-barred depictions of sex, drugs, and social calamity (seriously, fellow British millennials, how the hell did they get away with making this series?)
Hoult’s character, Tony Stonem, was an antihero, a 2000s version of a tortured ’50s teen idol with a manipulative streak a mile wide. You name it and he probably did it. He was intelligent but cruel, bordering on sociopathic. He wouldn’t have seemed out of place in something like Mike Leigh’s Naked. In the second series, he was in recovery from a traumatic accident, which left him with a wildly changed personality and sudden realization that he wasn’t a good person. It seemed like overkill to a lot of viewers, especially people my age who either loved or loathed Tony and were now expected to pity him at his weakest. But Hoult was uniformly excellent in the role, both dapper and devious. Skins birthed a whole generation of now-beloved British actors – Dev Patel, Jack O’Connell, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Kaluuya – and Hoult was no exception. He’d already done work far nervier than actors double his age before he was old enough to vote.
Hoult is capable of normal, of course. He’s done enough conventional historical dramas and biopics to prove that. Did you know he was the voice of John in that Chris Pratt Garfield movie? It’s not hard to see why someone like Clint Eastwood would be drawn to him for Juror #2, a film where close-ups of Hoult’s face do a lot of heavy lifting in conveying a troubling ethical quandary combined with panicky selfishness. Hoult is a handsome guy whose boyishness is especially effective in playing, to put it bluntly, total pricks. Consider The Menu, the black comedy where he plays a pretentious foodie who is ethered by the head chef in his suicide mission. Hoult exudes the unbearable smarm of privilege that is delightfully destroyed when he faces the first sliver of pushback he’s experienced in his entire life. The shot of his teary reaction as Ralph Fiennes whispered in his ear became a meme for a reason.
Up next, Hoult is in his action era with a David Leitch film, How to Rob a Bank. Freak mode with guns? Sounds up his alley. Why waste handsomeness on being boring?
