Nicholas Hoult lost Batman and Superman, then made the villain the better part

Nicholas Hoult

Photo: Fred Trauerts / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 7, 1989 Wokingham, Berkshire, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past
Awards	Critics' Choice (shared)

When James Gunn went looking for a new Superman, Nicholas Hoult walked into the audition wanting the cape. He walked out with the other part. Gunn later explained that the Englishman was wrong for the loose, open-hearted Clark Kent his script needed and exactly right for the coiled, furious genius on the far side of the fight. It was the second time a caped hero had gone to someone else: Matt Reeves had already picked Robert Pattinson over him for Batman. Hoult shaved his head, took Lex Luthor, and turned the consolation prize into the defining role of his career so far.

That swap is the shape of the whole career. The hero slot keeps landing on somebody else, and the stranger, colder, funnier part keeps landing on him. Hoult is at his sharpest when a character is slightly wrong in the head: a zombie narrating his own crush, a War Boy desperate to die in glory, an emperor who mistakes cruelty for wit. Give him a decent man to play and the screen tends to go quiet.

He grew up in Sindlesham, a village outside Wokingham in Berkshire, the son of a piano teacher and a commercial pilot, and the great-nephew of Anna Neagle, a star of British cinema between the wars. He trailed his older siblings to dance classes and auditions, danced in English National Ballet productions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, and at twelve swapped ballet for the Sylvia Young Theatre School. Born on 7 December 1989, he had his first film role at six, in the drama Intimate Relations.

The breakthrough arrived at eleven. As Marcus, the bullied, oddly self-possessed boy who adopts Hugh Grant‘s idle bachelor in Chris and Paul Weitz’s About a Boy (2002), he earned a Critics’ Choice nomination for best young actor. Five years later E4 handed him Tony Stonem, the manipulative charmer at the centre of Skins and Hoult, who had doubted he could play a boy that cruel, became the reason people watched. He left his A-levels at Farnborough after the first series, picked up a BAFTA Rising Star nomination, and in Tom Ford‘s A Single Man (2009) played Kenny, the student who shadows Colin Firth‘s grieving professor.

Hollywood took him in through the franchise door. In X-Men: First Class (2011) he became Hank McCoy, the Beast, a role he would carry, through long make-up sessions, until Dark Phoenix in 2019. Warm Bodies (2013) made him a romantic lead who happened to be dead. Then George Miller cast him as Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), a chalk-white, terminally ill War Boy who shouts “witness me” before every suicidal stunt. Hoult played him as a puppy with a death wish, and the part outlived most films he headlined.

That is the uncomfortable truth in his filmography. The leading-man version did not take for a long time. Jack the Giant Slayer (2013), built around him, failed at the box office. Dark Places, Kill Your Friends and Equals, all released in 2015, sit among the lowest-grossing films of his career, and when Collide sank in 2017, Forbes critic Scott Mendelson wrote that Hoult simply lacked the star power to open a film. In a run of earnest biopics he played J. D. Salinger in Rebel in the Rye, Nikola Tesla in The Current War and J. R. R. Tolkien in Tolkien, and critics kept circling the same complaint: RogerEbert.com’s Matt Fagerholm wrote that he was never “quite believable as Salinger”. For close to a decade the industry kept asking him to be admirable, the one register in which he is least interesting.

The correction came in a powdered wig. As Robert Harley, the sneering Tory schemer in Yorgos Lanthimos‘s The Favourite (2018), circling Olivia Colman‘s Queen Anne, Hoult shared the cast’s Critics’ Choice ensemble award. Hulu’s The Great (2020–2023) then gave him Peter III, a Russian emperor as petulant as he is dangerous, opposite Elle Fanning‘s Catherine. Hoult made the man ridiculous and frightening in the same breath, and the part brought him two Golden Globe nominations and an Emmy nomination for lead actor in a comedy. After that the villains came in a steady line: a hired killer in Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021), the fawning food bore Tyler in The Menu (2022), and the title role of Renfield (2023), as Dracula’s long-suffering servant opposite Nicolas Cage. That June the Academy invited him to join its actors branch.

In 2024, his busiest year, he voiced Jon Arbuckle in The Garfield Movie, played the doomed husband Thomas Hutter in Robert Eggers‘s Nosferatu, and in Justin Kurzel’s The Order became Robert Jay Mathews, the founder of a 1980s white-supremacist gang hunted by Jude Law‘s FBI agent. The strangest fate belonged to Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, in which Hoult carries the film as a juror who slowly realises he may have caused the death on trial. It is arguably the best leading performance he has given, and Warner Bros. opened it on roughly 30 American screens before sending it to streaming.

Then came Superman (2025), and the Luthor that Gunn built around him: obsessive, vain, convinced that a man from another planet is an insult to human effort.

The next stretch is crowded. On 13 November 2026 Amazon MGM releases David Leitch’s How to Rob a Bank, in which Hoult leads a crew of robbers who film their own heists for social media, alongside Zoë Kravitz, Pete Davidson and John C. Reilly. In August HBO announced him as Gilderoy Lockhart in the second season of its Harry Potter series; within weeks scheduling conflicts pulled him out, and Kit Harington took the role. Tom Ford, who gave him A Single Man, has also cast him as Tonio Treschi, the Venetian nobleman forced into life as a castrato singer, in Cry to Heaven, his adaptation of the Anne Rice novel, shot in Rome early in 2026 and featuring Adele in her first acting role. In 2027 he voices Boba in CoComelon: The Movie.

Away from sets he splits his time between London and Huntington Beach in California. He has two children with the American model Bryana Holly, his partner since 2016, whom he began publicly calling his wife in late 2024. A trained racing driver, he has competed in the Ferrari Challenge series, and in 2025 he became a Save the Children ambassador.

On 9 July 2027 he returns as Luthor in Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow, in which Superman and his nemesis are forced into an alliance against Brainiac. Gunn has described it as “as much a Lex movie as it is a Superman movie”. The actor who lost the cape is about to share the poster.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, James Gunn, Yorgos Lanthimos, Nosferatu, Mad Max: Fury Road, Nicholas Hoult, Superman, The Great

Related People

Robert Pattinson

James Gunn

Christopher Abbott

Jeremy Renner

Heather Graham

Rebel Wilson