Hayley Campbell

Lately, things have been increasingly weird for Nicholas Hoult. Then again, his characters have always been kind of weird. When we first met him in About A Boy 23 years ago, he played a socially awkward kid determined to secure himself a stepdad in the event his mother (Toni Collette) killed herself. Then in Skins, the TV show that made him far more famous than he was comfortable with, he played the manipulative, morally dubious Tony Stonem. In the closest thing he’s made to a romantic comedy, 2013’s Warm Bodies, he’s a zombie with a literally dead heart. Even Hoult thinks he’s at his best when he’s having the most fun, doing weird shit like getting pissed off with a duck and threatening to eat its liver with a cornichon in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite, or in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where he played Nux, a sickly War Boy desperate to explode himself into Valhalla.

Last year saw the release of three Hoult movies, which were all shot one after the other, with only a couple of days’ break in-between. He went from having his life destroyed by Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, to playing real-life neo-Nazi Bob Mathews in Justin Kurzel’s The Order, to portraying a possibly guilty man in Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, with a screentest pitstop between the last two for James Gunn’s Superman. Which may be one of the biggest blockbusters of the year, but with Hoult playing Lex Luthor, Superman’s nemesis this time around is bound to be a more off-kilter megalomaniac.

For a nice young man who says a cheery hello to Empire’s cat when said feline jumps up and fills the Zoom screen with his furry body, it’s notable that Hoult rarely seems to play the nice young man. He was in Dublin for a friend’s stag do when we called him, way too early in the morning, to ask about his whole deal.

Read more at Empire.