X-Men franchise and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-winning The Favourite. He apologizes
for dipping his fries in my ketchup, and asks whether I’m okay when I fan a fly from my
face. “Oh, I thought something smelled,” he says in mock relief. “I was like, Did I shit
myself and not realize it?” It’s all a little disarming.
“Nick doesn’t have a problem making fun of himself,” says Lily Collins, who costars
in Tolkien as Edith, Hoult’s love interest and, later, his wife. While filming in Liverpool,
the pair bonded during trips to an art museum and the Cavern Club, an early Beatles
hangout. “He’s exactly how I’d hoped he would be,” Collins says. “Nothing has gone
to his head.” Hoult laughs off the notion that he’s dodged the curse of the Former
Child Star. “We’re still in early days yet,” he says. “It could rear its ugly head soon.”
Set against the looming threat of World War I, Tolkien brings to life the secret soci-
ety that the author formed with three childhood friends—the fellowship, if you will. In
terms of fealty, the group is not dissimilar to Frodo’s Hobbit companions, and the origins
of the Lord of the Rings universe unfold on bucolic English campuses and the bloody
battlefields of the western front.
When it comes to his own story, growing up in rural Berkshire, England, with his
parents and three siblings, Hoult doesn’t recall such boyhood allegiances. Instead, he
brings up how his younger sister, fellow actress Clarista, would “tag along with my stu-
pid games in return for my playing with her and her dolls.” As a teenager, he shed his
sweet About a Boy image by playing a scheming Lothario for a couple of seasons on the
edgy teen drama Skins, but he insists his real life in no way mirrored the series. “We’d go
out on the weekends and get in trouble,” he says of his castmates (who included Get Out’s
Daniel Kaluuya and Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel), “but we were not as crazy as that.”
Upon noticing the collective gaze of a nearby tableful of women, Hoult slouches down
“HE REALLY PUTS HIMSELF
INTO HIS WORK, WHETHER
HE LOOKS SILLY OR HE’S
A SUPERHERO,” SAYS HOULT’S
TOLKIEN COSTAR, LILY COLLINS.
BELOW, FROM TOP: HOULT
AND SOPHIE TURNER IN DARK
PHOENIX; HOULT IN TOLKIEN.in his seat. It’s not uncommon for an actor to guard his
privacy, but Hoult does so with a rare ferocity. Last year,
he had a baby with his girlfriend, model Bryana Holly, but
his family remains a verboten topic, except when joking
about the couple’s plans for the little one’s first birthday,
which, as of this writing, were still in the works: “I think
we’re keeping it very low-key. I got Michael Bublé to re-
cord a couple of new songs,” he says with a laugh, adding,
“I don’t know. I don’t even have parties myself, because
I’m like, No one’s going to show up.” When asked about
reconnecting with his ex, Jennifer Lawrence, on the set
of this month’s Dark Phoenix, he stays on script. “It’s like
going back to school after the summer holidays. The real-
ity of [the X-Men franchise] is there are lots of characters,
so everyone was together for brief periods, but not every
day for four months.”
Hoult’s pursuit of anonymity recently led him to a
book that’s more metaphysical than mythological—Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “A sports car
draws attention, everyone sees you get out, it’s a thing.
But on a bike, you’re under a helmet,” he says. “I’m only
50 pages in, but it describes the feeling of being on a bike
and in the landscape as opposed to being inside a car.
There’s something lovely about that.”
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