ABOUT A MAN
NICHOLAS HOULT ARRIVED TWICE.
Once, as an awkward 12-year-old in 2002’s About A Boy, then again in 2007 as moral vacuum Tony in TV’s Skins. He was troublingly convincing in this latter guise, but turned things on their head again for the show’s second season in which, after being hit by a bus, Tony suffered substantial brain damage and emerged lost and wounded. I was spellbound by what the now 17-year-old Hoult was doing, and how good he was at doing it. Ten years on and he’s only got better, providing intense character work regardless of genre, be it in smaller dramas or big-budget spectacles.
In Tolkien, he plays the author as he forms a close group of friends at school and falls in love, only to have it all shaken by World War I, a horrific experience which leaves him traumatised but determined to honour the fallen. Hoult’s Tolkien is damaged but driven. His characters are always driven — hurtling towards something, or someone (often physically). Just as his Tolkien defies death to do right by his friends, nothing can stop Nux’s kamikaze complex in Mad Max: Fury Road, and X-Men’s Hank/Beast is similarly stubborn. With Hoult’s characters, there are always cogs turning.
I’ve seen Yorgos Lanthimos’ three times, and Hoult’s Harley is a hoot every time, bringing the pomp like no-one’s business, again unwilling to let anybody get in his way, happy to shove them into a ditch if they do. He’s, also written by Tony MacNamara, in which Hoult plays Russia’s Peter The Great, but when I speak to him he’s still high off the success of , “elated” by Olivia Colman’s win at the Oscars. A good place to start.
