48 hours after the American presidential election, Nicholas Hoult is pondering the nature of human egotism in a car on the way to downtown Los Angeles. At present, he’s set to star in three of the year’s most highly anticipated films: Clint Eastwood’s slow-paced court procedural Juror #2, Justin Kurzel’s historical drama The Order, and Robert Eggers’ recapitulation of Gothic classic Nosferatu.

A judiciary flick; a tale exploring the rise and fall of a white supremacist faction; a seminal monster movie remade for modern horror sensibilities—varied titles in their breadth, scope, and audience, but all ones that engage with the ever-salient question of Otherdom. Nicholas Hoult, where does fear wedge itself between the Self and the ever-encroaching Other? Does villainy arrive by way of outside monstrosity, or does it come from an all-consuming self-interest?

Hoult, hurdling down the 101, arrives at some conclusion: “You would like to think, at the core, that you’re a good person and you make decent choices. Then when you’re put in a predicament and you find yourself hedging...the effects of this become very tricky.”

If one is pondering the ways story conventions can be manipulated to convey messages about good and evil, there is perhaps nobody better to speak with than this particular British actor. Nicholas Hoult has spent nearly 30 years appearing in a slew of romances and period pieces and comedies and dramas and IP franchises and indie horrors. He made his screen debut at age six as Bobby in Philip Goodhew’s Intimate Relations and was then Marcus in About a Boy at age 11. He was 17 and he was Tony Stonem in Skins. He was Beast in the X-Men franchise, and he was a zombie vivified by love in Warm Bodies; Hoult was Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road and he was Harley in The Favourite. He was Tolkien in Tolkien and Tyler in The Menu and Renfield in Renfield and Peter the Great in The Great.

Now a seasoned vet in the mechanisms of narrative and how they can be deployed to communicate a specific message, Hoult certainly has the liberty of choosing which stories he wishes to tell, and the ways in which he wants to tell them.

“I don’t know if I would describe [my acting] as empathy,” he tells me. We’re talking about Hoult’s approach to Bob Mathews in The Order—a role that required Hoult to delve into the body, mind, and heart of 20th-century domestic terrorist Bob Mathews. In the latter half of the 1980s, Mathews pillaged banks and Brink’s trucks to fund a populist Neo-Nazi organization (The Order) in the Pacific Northwest. He was relatively successful in harnessing nativist sentiments to declare war on the FBI in the name of white nationalism, before being burned alive in his own home, choosing death over resignation to the state.The real-life Mathews wrote and spoke often about a desire to “quit being the hunted and become the hunter,” an anti-government ideation that echoes across the decades, landing chillingly, fitting quite neatly into the time and place in which Hoult and I speak. Kurzel’s film follows Mathews’ rise to power and subsequent fall at the hands of Jude Law’s FBI agent Terry Husk.

“I don’t know if I had sat there and ever thought, ‘Oh, I feel this person,’ which maybe makes me a bad actor,” he asserts, “ButI also don’t think that I need to feel empathy in those moments when I’m inhabiting,” Hoult tells me. To prepare for the role, Hoult read The Turner Diaries, a 1978 dystopian novel about the ritual persecution of whites in the distant future, in which a valiant sect of purists revolt against a seemingly oppressive anti-gun, pro- diversity government. Since its publishing, the novel has been cited by numerous domestic terrorists, inspiring hundreds of hate- based murders and attacks. The novel was removed from Amazon bookstore shelves following January 6th, 2021.

Hoult describes the enactment of Mathews as a terrifying one, even whilst filming: “I don’t know what word I would use to describe it because I don’t want to say. It was just so much more... noise, emotion, even if it was fake, and all this stuff erupting in that room around me. We looked over and we’re like, ‘Wow, this is scary,’ in a way that I don’t think anyone sees.” Hoult is referring to a scene in which Mathews cajoles a church into chanting “One Mind. One Body. One Race,” a soul-blackening sight to behold— and from the tenor of his voice while speaking about it—an even more appalling scene to recreate.

“What people seem to need,” Hoult surmises, pausing to think about the ways he sees the seeds of hatred that he so carefully sowed in the film play out in real-time, “is that sense of community, striving to be better. At the moment, whether that’s technology, it’s all affecting human brain capacity in different ways.” He trails off.

“I think that’s the benign of evil. A lot of the time evil nowadays arrives by way of someone sat in front of a screen having things put in front of them that aren’t true, rather than having conversations and being out in the real world with people...I hope that [with movies like The Order] we can examine them as a society in terms of a more complex way of being like, ‘Hang on, how are these people accepted and made? How can we prevent future events like this or these sorts of voices?’”

Hoult saw the insidious, prideful ends of individualism as it manifested as hatred in Mathews and his cohort, though his role as Justin Kemp in Clint Eastwood’s rumored-to-be-final film Juror #2 explores an equally nuanced danger—that of passivity, that of self-preservation, in the face of justice. In the film, Hoult is an everyman placed on a jury for a murder trial (opposite prosecutor and former About a Boy costar Toni Collette) in which he begins to suspect that he—not the abusive gang member boyfriend on trial—killed the deceased in what he believed to be a deer hit-and- run a year prior.

The film’s utmost refusal to absolve the protagonist of blame (or ascribe him demonstrably villainous characteristics) endears Hoult’s earnest Justin Kemp to an audience—and enlists the audience in potentially becoming complicit in their sympathy; all becoming jurors of their own rights. “In lots of films and stories we’re told when we’re kids,” Hoult continues, “we want to know clearly when we’re watching something, ‘Who’s the good person? Who’s the bad person? Who am I rooting for here?’ Then, as you get older, things start to get a little bit murkier,” Hoult smiles. “I think [Eastwood] is kind of the master of tense. It was never pushed. I think [Juror #2] in other filmmakers’ hands, could be like, ‘Now we want to see him do something that could make the audience say he’s a bad guy.’”

Hoult laughs and continues, “I saw a few people saying they wanted to go watch the film as an escape from politics and what’s going on...I don’t know if it’s quite the escape. It may be an interesting examination. Justice can be thwarted. It’s the best system we’ve got but it’s not necessarily foolproof, obviously, as we can all see...” Notably, Hoult speaks in the collective tense—though a Brit born and raised, he has a vested interest in the American political system, with an American wife and two children he keeps private.

As far as escapes go, Hoult doesn’t expect his forthcoming projects to allow respite from a world rife with what he describes as “traps; rabbit holes of evil.” Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is certainly not a comfort movie. The film is one of the first popular horror movies—originally a 1922 silent film, reprised in the 1970s by Werner Herzog, the tale is now on its third reprisal in just over a century. Canonically, the narrative follows 19th-century European real estate agent Thomas Hutter as he interacts with an ancient, vampiric creature, brings plague on his town, and loses his wife to the demon in the process. Though all of the Nosferatu films are laden with motifs of monstrosity and sickness, each iteration of the story underscores some social fear of the age—this time around, fear itself seems to be the issue at hand: Eggers prods at the terror of isolation, the small horror that arrives with realizing the veil between desire and desperation isn’t so opaque.

“For Nosferatu, it’s interesting because Thomas is someone who is unaware of his fear in some ways,” Hoult surmises. “His wife [Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp], is someone who’s in touch with herself and kind of the evil existing in the world.” Eggers’ retelling of the Nosferatu/Dracula story knits the Ellen character with more tenderness and agency than any of the previous films; neither damsel-in-distress nor cold- blooded killer, Depp delivers an outstanding performance alongside Hoult’s Thomas. The relationship between man, wife, depression, sickness, and isolation is excavated with a cool precision at the hand of Eggers—isolating Hoult’s Thomas, Depp’s Ellen, and Taylor-Johnson’s Friedrich. “These characters,” he explains, “are detained [by fear].”

Hoult presses further. Actually, Eggers’ Nosferatu felt like it was “more about the fear of losing. There’s this co-dependent relationship—a fear of losing your master, and fear of serving them, and also fear of the monster you’ve become because of the choices you’ve made,” he asserts.

Hoult considers this sort of codependency—this loss of self—in his relationship to the characters he plays. He has, after all, been acting for nearly as long as he could read. This is perhaps why he doesn’t feel the need to form a sense of empathy towards his characters to act them in full. However, on set of a film with Michael Shannon, Hoult recalls the fellow actor saying: “I’m not being the guy, I’m being a ghost of this character.”

“That really stuck with me moving forward...[When working], I’m creating a ghost-like version of this person. You can’t be them, but you can represent them to the best of your knowledge and ability under those circumstances. That was quite freeing in a way.”

Hoult’s car exits the freeway. He’s arrived downtown. In the months following our conversation, his face and ghostly likeness will transmogrify hatred and fear and self-interest on the silver screen, but Hoult himself will keep his distance. He’ll likely train for another Ferrari race as the next season approaches (he’s already secured a timed lap victory at the Ferrari Club Challenge in Watkins Glen); he’ll continue his ongoing ambassadorship with French horological Maison Jaeger-LeCoultre. He’ll spend time with his children (“Outside of work, it’s back to playing,” he laughs), and he’ll do his best to embrace any darkness with a sense of understanding. Hopefully.

Nicholas Hoult has the singular talent of selecting stories that he thinks deserve to be told, and relaying them with the utmost respect towards the audience that needs to hear them. In Hoult’s view, the shadow and the self walk hand and hand. Maybe the world could accomplish some level of improvement if we all thought like that.

Photographed by Michael Muller

Styled by Monty Jackson at A-Frame Agency

Written by Annie Bush

Grooming: Jamie Taylor at A-Frame Agency using Tom Ford 

Flaunt Film: Wyatt Stromer and Isaac Dektor

Flaunt Film music: Sun Room 

Stylist Assistants: Jake Mitchell and Mars Espinoza

Production Assistant: Selena Aiyla

Location: Hubble Studio

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