Nicholas Hoult

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Hoult has played a zombie, a Russian emperor, a doomed war boy and, in 2025, Lex Luthor. The English actor has been nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. Forbes placed him on its 30 Under 30 list in 2012. His career has not been a straight climb. Some of his best-known work sits beside films that critics and audiences rejected. So how did a child who first walked into a rehearsal room as a tag-along sibling become a lead in big studio films? Why did a long run of disappointing releases fail to end his career? And what does he do when the cameras stop?

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• 2. Berkshire Beginnings

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  Nicholas Caradoc Hoult was born on the 7th of December 1989 in Wokingham, Berkshire. His mother, Glenis, was a piano teacher, and his father, Roger, was a commercial pilot. His middle name comes from Middle Welsh and means "beloved one." A paternal great-aunt, Anna Neagle, had been a celebrated stage and film actress in the 1930s and 1940s.

  He grew up with three siblings in the village of Sindlesham, on a quiet estate. His older brother and sisters loved acting and dancing, and young Nicholas tagged along to their classes and auditions. In a 2011 interview with The Guardian he called his childhood "pretty outdoorsy" and "normal," full of "running around in the garden and making tree houses."

  Ballet came before cameras. He danced with the English National Ballet in productions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. He also played the trombone, sang in a local choir and played basketball for the Reading Rockets of the English Basketball League. The club later made him its ambassador.

  The acting career began with a theatre director who watched a play starring his brother. The director noticed that the small boy could "concentrate well" and offered him a part in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Soon afterwards he was cast in his first feature film, Intimate Relations, released in 1996. Television followed, with episodes of Casualty, Brass Eye, Silent Witness, The Bill, Judge John Deed and Doctors.

  He did not treat any of it as a calling. In a March 2009 interview with The Daily Telegraph he said he was not "in love with it... I just enjoyed it. It was like playing for a football team." Then came a role that arrived with a very long audition process.

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• 3. Marcus and Tony

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  The casting for About a Boy, the 2002 comedy-drama from Chris and Paul Weitz, dragged on and cut into his school days. Hoult did not want to audition. He entered the early rounds anyway and ended up as Marcus, a "woolly-hatted, oddball son of a suicidal, hippy-ish single mother, who gets bullied horribly at school." The film grossed more than $130 million worldwide. David Thomas of The Daily Telegraph credited the film's appeal to Hoult's performance.

  Success brought a change of school that he did not enjoy. He moved to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in London, found the change difficult and said he preferred a regular school. At 14 he left for Ranelagh School in Bracknell. He still did not see acting as a profession.

  Two films in 2005 gave him little to show for the effort. He played a boy watching his family come apart in Wah-Wah, a semi-autobiographical film by Richard E. Grant set in 1960s Swaziland. He also made his Hollywood debut in Gore Verbinski's The Weather Man. Both did poorly at the box office, and his performance in the second went largely unnoticed.

  By 2006 he was a student at Farnborough Sixth Form College in Hampshire, studying English literature, biology and psychology. That year he was cast as the lead in Skins, a teenage drama broadcast on E4. His character, Tony Stonem, was manipulative and egocentric. Hoult doubted he could play him and felt closer to the supporting character Sid.

  The show ran for seven series, but Hoult appeared in only two. It won the BAFTA Philip Audience Award, and he was nominated for a Golden Nymph Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series. Looking back in 2016, the critic Elliott David wrote that Hoult "maintained the inexplicable core of his character throughout."

  The attention was hard to bear. Hoult felt overwhelmed and at one point considered giving up acting entirely. Instead he left college after the first series and committed to the work.

  He briefly played Stefan Fredman in the pilot of the television series Wallander. In March 2009 he made his West End debut at Trafalgar Studios as Mark, the lead in William Sutcliffe's play New Boy. Ticket sales broke records, which was mostly put down to his following from Skins. The run lasted only a week because he had already committed to a film due to shoot in mid-2010. Reviews split. Dominic Cavendish of The Daily Telegraph found him persuasive, while Lyn Gardner of The Guardian found him average.

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• 4. A Grown-Up Role

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  The film that pulled Hoult away from the stage was Clash of the Titans, a fantasy adventure released in 2010. Critics panned it, yet it grossed nearly $500,000,000 worldwide.

  A smaller film mattered more to his reputation. Tom Ford's A Single Man gave him a part only after the actor first cast as Kenny Potter left the production a few days before filming began. Hoult had already shown interest and had sent in a recorded audition tape. He played Kenny, a college student who helps a professor cope with grief.

  Media outlets variously called it his first adult role. Hoult described Kenny as "spontaneous" and not defined merely by his sexuality. It was also his first American character, so he worked on his accent. Sukhdev Sandhu of The Daily Telegraph pointed out Ford's casting game. British actors Hoult and Matthew Goode played Americans, while the American Julianne Moore played an Englishwoman.

  The film opened to widespread acclaim, with some reservations about Ford's directing, and was a box-office success. At the 2010 ceremony it earned Hoult a nomination for the BAFTA Rising Star Award. That year he also lent his voice to the character Elliot in Fable III, a video game from Lionhead Studios.

  His other 2010 project had been waiting in the wings for some time, and it would reshape his next few years.

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• 5. The Beast Years

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  Heavy rain in Australia wrecked the pre-production schedule for Mad Max: Fury Road in 2010, and a film that had planned to shoot that mid-year slipped out of reach. With no other commitments, Hoult started looking elsewhere. He landed Hank McCoy, also known as Beast, in the X-Men series. He was chosen for his ability to play someone "gentle with a capability of being fierce."

  Before filming X-Men: First Class, a 2011 prequel directed by Matthew Vaughn, he built his own version of the character. He took inspiration from Kelsey Grammer's Beast in X-Men: The Last Stand, wanting the same charm and eloquence. He learned to speak in a similar dialect without copying Grammer. He also trained and gained weight for the part.

  Critics praised the script and performances. The film collected about $353 million against a budget of $160 million, the lowest total in the series. Chris Aronson of 20th Century Fox still called it "an excellent start to a new chapter of the franchise."

  During that shoot in 2010, Hoult began dating his co-star Jennifer Lawrence. Their relationship ended around the time they wrapped X-Men: Days of Future Past in August 2014.

  In that film, directed by Bryan Singer, the make-up could take up to three and a half hours to apply. Hoult found it freeing. He said it was "fun to suddenly be able to break loose... when you're wearing the makeup... you can perform big." The film earned more than $747 million worldwide, the biggest total in the series and in his career at that point.

  He returned for X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016, despite doubts about his contract with the franchise. It earned about $540 million, third among the X-Men films, and did especially well outside the United States. His last turn as Beast was in Dark Phoenix in 2019, which was poorly received.

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• 6. Wasteland and Zombies

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  George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road was finally filmed in the Namibian desert in 2012. Hoult played Nux, a terminally ill slave whom Miller conceived as a "quasi kamikaze pilot." Hoult described him as "very enthusiastic and committed and affectionate but also kind of clumsy." He shaved his head and followed a strict diet to lose weight.

  He called the stunt work "scary" but preferred Miller's use of real action over a green screen. He felt it made the performance more believable. The film opened on the 14th of May 2015 to critical acclaim and grossed more than $378 million, the most in the Mad Max franchise. Shalini Langer wrote that Charlize Theron was the real hero, but Hoult came closest as Joe's "war boy" chasing imagined glory. Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph called his turn "fabulously unhinged."

  The other role of 2013 was stranger. In Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies, released on the 1st of February, Hoult played R, a zombie who narrates much of the film. It adapts a novel by Isaac Marion. Levine said he struggled to find an actor until he met Hoult, who called the film "much more than a horror movie" because of its pop culture and literary allusions.

  Hoult drew on Edward Scissorhands for the character. To learn zombie movement, he and the other actors worked with Cirque du Soleil performers in a dance studio. He recalled that "we would take our shoes off... kind of grow out of the wall and make our bodies feel very heavy." Ben Kendrick praised his restraint in a role that could have been ridiculous.

  Not every swing connected. Jack the Giant Slayer, also from 2013, failed at the box office. Mary Pols called his imitation of Hugh Grant "disconcerting," and Justin Chang and Richard Roeper found him and his character "bland" and "boring."

  Young Ones, a 2014 science-fiction film shot in South Africa, premiered at Sundance. Keith Uhlich of The A.V. Club thought Hoult a poor fit for its "stoically retrograde machismo." In 2015 came Dark Places, Kill Your Friends and Equals, all critical failures and among the lowest earners of his career. In Equals, Peter Travers called him and Kristen Stewart "quietly devastating."

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• 7. Playing Real People

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  Collide, a 2017 action film in which he played a drug dealer, drew negative reviews. Its failure was blamed on poor marketing and delays after the 2015 Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Relativity Media. Scott Mendelson of Forbes wrote that Hoult lacked the "star power" to draw crowds, and also argued that men in his position keep getting offers after such failures.

  Newness, a romance about a Los Angeles couple who meet through online dating, premiered at Sundance in 2017. Its director, Drake Doremus, called the role "a very complex and emotionally mature performance that we haven't seen yet."

  That year Hoult chose a run of biographical and historical parts. He said the "actors I look up to started doing their best work in their early 30s and I'll be hitting that age... I'm just trying to learn." In Rebel in the Rye he played J. D. Salinger. The script drew him because he had not known Salinger fought in the Second World War and landed on D-Day, or that he later took up Vedanta philosophy.

  Hoult read The Catcher in the Rye and biographies of the author. He worried that "everyone has an idea of Salinger in their mind." Reviews were poor. Carson Lund of Slant called his performance "feeble," and Matt Fagerholm of RogerEbert.com blamed the script for leaving the character's motives "frustratingly muddled."

  In The Current War he played Nikola Tesla, grew a moustache and sat through lessons on electromagnetism and dynamos. David Ehrlich of IndieWire likened the performance to a tribute to David Bowie, who had played Tesla in The Prestige. Hoult also played an American soldier in Sand Castle, filmed on Jordanian military bases. There he practised clearing procedures in a pitch-black house, wearing masks and carrying guns. The film reached Netflix in 2017.

  In The Favourite, a 2018 period drama about Queen Anne, he played Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer. He voiced Fiver in a television miniseries of Richard Adams' Watership Down. In 2019 he played J. R. R. Tolkien in Tolkien, which was poorly received.

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• 8. Villains and Engines

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  Hulu's The Great, which began in 2020, gave Hoult his most celebrated role, Peter III of Russia. The series and his performance received critical acclaim. It also brought MTV's Best Villain award in 2021. After that came a villainous part in Those Who Wish Me Dead in 2021, then the black comedy The Menu in 2022 and the title role in the comedy-horror Renfield. In June 2023 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited him to join its actors branch.

  In 2024 he voiced Jon Arbuckle in The Garfield Movie, starred in Justin Kurzel's The Order, and appeared in Clint Eastwood's courtroom drama Juror #2. He also played Thomas Hutter in Robert Eggers's Nosferatu. The London Film Critics' Circle named him British/Irish Performer of the Year for 2025 across three of those films.

  In James Gunn's Superman, released in 2025, he played Lex Luthor. Hoult described the character as obsessive, determined and relentless, and wanted him to feel like a credible threat. Gunn drew on Brian Azzarello's 2005 comic series Lex Luthor: Man of Steel and on Jerry Siegel's "reckless scientific genius" from the comics of the 1950s and 1960s. The Seattle Film Critics Society named him Villain of the Year.

  Away from sets, he divides his time between London and Huntington Beach, California. He plays basketball and golf and trains in jiu-jitsu and boxing. He follows Grand Prix motorcycle racing and Formula One. In 2022 he graduated from Ferrari's Corso Pilota driving school and has since competed in Ferrari Challenge events. In 2024 he won the "Track Attack" at Watkins Glen in his Ferrari 296 GTB.

  He has two children with the American model Bryana Holly. The first was born in 2018 and the second in 2022.

  His charity work centres on children. He was the first NSPCC Young Person Ambassador and entered its Hall of Fame in 2010. Since 2009 he has visited patients supported by the Teenage Cancer Trust. In January 2017 he drove an auto rickshaw about 3000 km across India in the Rickshaw Run to raise money for that charity and the World Wide Fund for Nature. He travelled to Nairobi, Kenya, for a Christian Aid water and sanitation project. In 2025 he became a Save the Children Ambassador.

  Hoult tore his ACL playing basketball in mid-2025 and had surgery that October. He is due to return as Lex Luthor in Man of Tomorrow in 2027.

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