46 LISTENER JUNE 8 2019
Books & Culture
N
icholas Hoult remembers
reading The Hobbit. He was
an 11-year-old on the set
of About a Boy, in which he
played Marcus, the awk-
ward kid in the adaptation
of Nick Hornby’s book, in
what was his first major big-screen role.
He was given a copy by one of the films’
two directors and devoured it between
takes. About the same time, a certain
Middle-earth movie series was kicking off- he loved those, too. He’d soon be stay-
ing late at school playing The Lord of the
Rings trading-card game with his mates.
Now, 18 years and many movie roles
later, Hoult’s latest film has a scene in
which he picks up a pen and writes: “In
a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit
...”
Hoult plays JRR Tolkien in Tolkien, a
captivating and imaginative biopic about
the author’s life until the early 1930s,
when he began writing his first Middle-
earth tale. Hoult may have read the books,
seen the movies and played the card
game, but he says he didn’t know any-
thing about the man himself. “I was even
mispronouncing his name – I was saying
Tol-kine not Tol-keen.”
He knows quite a bit more about him
now, having done a crash course on the
life of the writer, a long-time Oxford pro-
fessor whose study of ancient languages
and mythology and gift for illustration
were the foundation of his fantasy epics.
“It was a steep learning curve in terms
of getting an understanding of him. But
it was actually a real joy to go back and
revisit his work by learning about his life
and trying to line up the patterns and
similarities and where the inspiration
might have come from in those formative
years – where those ideas and that imagi-
nation stemmed from.”
The English actor is talking to the Lis-
tener in a break from being a star attraction
at Armageddon Wellington, where the
autograph requests will be coming from
fans of his X-Men superhero franchise
character Hank McCoy/The Beast, the
unhinged Nux of Mad Max: Fury Road, thelove-struck zombie in Warm Bodies or his
role in edgy teen British television drama
Skins.
More recently, he appeared in The
Favourite as politician Robert Harley, a big
Whig in a very big wig. He was one of few
memorable male characters in the female-
powered period black comedy, which won
Olivia Colman an Oscar, among many
accolades. Asked if The Favourite felt like it
would be something special while making
it, Hoult is equivocal.
“The ingredients were all there for it to
be an interesting, original, good film, but,
at the same time, you never quite knowwhat the results will be. Sometimes you
can make what you consider to be a good
film and it just isn’t released at the right
time, or it doesn’t get picked up in the
right areas and it’s not part of the zeitgeist
in terms of what people are feeling or
thinking about. But it’s nice when it all
works out right.” No, he didn’t keep the
wig.
Studio connections from The Favourite
put Hoult in the frame for the title role
in Tolkien. The movie started with Irish
playwright and screenwriter David Glee-
son, who thought the early life of Tolkien
might be the basis for a movie.
The job of making it was given to
Finnish director Dome Karukoski whose
previous film was the critical hit Tom of
Finland, a biopic about the Finnish homo-
erotic artist Touko Laaksonen.
Karukoski has said that Tolkien’s
knowledge of the Finnish language and
mythology, and their apparent influence
on his own work, attracted him to the
idea. So, too, did the dramas in Tolkien’s
early life. He was left an orphan at 12,
graduated from Oxford at 23, fought in
the Battle of the Somme at 24, and, at
28, became a professor at Leeds Univer-
sity, before returning to Oxford where
he would spend the rest of his academic
career.
Karukoski’s film also tells the story of
Tolkien’s fellowship with three school
chums, at King Edward’s School in Bir-
mingham, where they formed the “TCBS”Look who’s Tolkien
Nicholas Hoult stars as the creator of The Lord of the Rings in a biopic
that contemplates how the writer’s early life may have influenced his
adventures in Middle-earth. by RUSSELL BAILLIE
The WWI scenes come
with hallucinations of fire-breathing monsters and
dark knights; all part ofa delirium brought on by
trench fever.BOOKS • MUSIC • CLASSICAL • FILM
Formative years: Nicholas Hoult as JRR Tolkien.