Nicholas Hoult on making J.D. Salinger biopic Rebel in the Rye, playing Tesla in The Current War, and erotic romance Newness
At only 27 years old, the talented British actor has already played famous authors, superheroes, and historical figures in his impressive career – but he feels the best is still to come
Nicholas Hoult, the 11-year-old kid who so endeared himself to the audience in 2002’s About A Boy, has matured.
At 27 Hoult is reprising his Beast role in the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix, but he is also in the throes of a defining moment of his career, portraying the early adulthood of a trio of monumental historical figures: J.D. Salinger in Rebel in the Rye, Nikola Tesla in The Current War and J.R.R. Tolkien in Tolkien, which is currently filming.
“I like to play characters where I can improve as an actor, and I’m lucky that I’ve been working with incredible people,” Hoult says. “The actors I look up to started doing their best work in their early 30s and I’ll be hitting that age in the coming years. For the moment I’m just trying to learn, and I want to do different things.”
The three recent men he plays though have glaring similarities in that all were troubled geniuses. While Salinger and Tolkien struggled with horrific memories of the world wars that fed into their most famous respective works, The Catcher in the Rye and The Lord of the Rings, Tesla was so visionary with his ideas on electricity and even drones, that few people took him seriously.
“Tesla’s obsessive-compulsive moments in his life, also his germaphobia, all these little elements that buoyed his imagination made him seem slightly odd,” Hoult says of the man now recognised by the likes of Elon Musk, who has named an electric car after him.
