Boy To Man

A lunch date with fiercely private actor—and new father— NICHOLAS HOULT.

- Phoebe Reilly

When he was 11, Nicholas Hoult received a gift that proved to be prophetic: On the set of 2002’s About a Boy, directors Chris and Paul Weitz handed him a copy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The book left an impression on the young actor, as did Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—“The films are burned into my retina,” Hoult says—though in preparation for portraying the revered author, in May’s illuminating biopic Tolkien, he realized that his grasp of the philologist’s dense mythology had loosened. “I wouldn’t say I retained a lot,” he admits, adding that it was a nice homework assignment to revisit the novel.

It’s a chilly afternoon in Hollywood, and Hoult, 29, has arrived early for lunch, dressed in a blue bomber jacket and jeans. Traces of the cherubic misfit he played in About a Boy are still visible, though his eyebrows now flare upward like quotation marks to add a bit of ironic detachment to his handsome porcelain features. His demeanor is closer to that of a blind date than a child actor– turned–movie star whose diverse résumé includes the X-Men franchise and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-winning The Favourite. He apologizes for dipping his fries in my ketchup, and asks whether I’m okay when I fan a fly from my face. “Oh, I thought something smelled,” he says in mock relief. “I was like, Did I shit myself and not realize it?” It’s all a little disarming.