Nicholas Hoult

Nicholas Hoult (born December 7, 1989, Wokingham, Berkshire, England) is a British actor who is perhaps best known for playing Hank McCoy (“Beast”) in the X-Men series of movies and Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

Early life and first roles

Hoult was the great nephew of British stage and screen star Dame Anna Neagle. His father was a commercial pilot, his mother taught piano, and his three siblings all had acting experience. At the age of three, Hoult sat transfixed watching his brother, James, perform in a play and was discovered by the director of that production, who remarked that if he could concentrate on watching a play, then he could be in one.

Hoult made his feature-film debut in Intimate Relations (1996), but it was his second film, About a Boy (2002), made when he was 12 years old, that brought him international attention. In the comedy, which was based on a novel by Nick Hornby, he portrayed a nerdy child with “Vulcan” eyebrows who is taken under the wing of an unlikely mentor (played by Hugh Grant).

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Skins, the X-Men franchise, and Mad Max: Fury Road

Hoult’s career as a child actor was brief, however, because in the span of three years he grew to a height of 6 feet 3 inches (1.9 meters). As a teen, he portrayed “heartless heartthrob” Tony Stonem in the British TV drama Skins (2007–08) before American fashion designer Tom Ford lured him to Hollywood to appear in Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man (2009). Hoult starred opposite Colin Firth as a charming college student who uses his seductive powers to draw out a grieving and closeted gay man. In 2013 he appeared as a zombie in Warm Bodies.

Hoult’s first action film was Clash of the Titans (2010). He then physically transformed himself beyond recognition to play the Beast in X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). He underwent another transformation for his role in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). In the futuristic thriller he was cast as Nux, a bald-headed, pasty-faced War Boy and fanatic follower in the army of villainous Immortan Joe. In 2015 Holt also starred with Kristen Stewart in Equals, about a young couple who begin a furtive romance in a futuristic society in which the development of feelings signals deadly disease and banishment.

The Favourite and The Great

Hoult’s later film credits included the British action thriller Collide, in which he portrayed an American backpacker who becomes involved with drug smugglers after getting a job as their driver, and Sand Castle (both 2016), about the Iraq War. In Rebel in the Rye (2017), he starred as J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye. Continuing to show his versatility, Hoult played an 18th-century politician in The Favourite (2018), a historical drama about Queen Anne’s court. During this time he also lent his voice to the animated TV miniseries Watership Down (2018), which was based on Richard Adams’s beloved children’s book. Hoult’s credits from 2019 included the biopic Tolkien, about the early years of the famed writer. The following year he appeared in The Banker, playing the front man for two African American entrepreneurs in the 1950s.

In 2020 Hoult returned to television with the debut of two series: The Great (ended 2023), a fictionalized dramedy about the rise of Catherine the Great, and Crossing Swords (ended 2021), an animated comedy in which he voiced a peasant who becomes a squire. He then played a killer hunting a young boy in the action-thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021). In The Menu (2022), Hoult portrayed a pretentious foodie. His credits from 2024 include Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, a courtroom drama about a juror on a murder case who begins to think he might be the killer, and the crime-thriller The Order, about a white supremacist group.

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