When the 12-year-old Nicholas Hoult first made an impression in 2002's About a Boy, Hugh Grant was playing opposite him as an overgrown adolescent living off his family's residuals -- basically, the nightmare of any child actor. Hoult's own coming-of-age has been the furthest thing from lazy, and after recapturing attention two years ago in the rude UK teen soap Skins, he landed the role of Kenny, who admires and longs for Colin Firth in Tom Ford's A Single Man.
Newly twenty and on the cusp of more adult roles (he'll next be seen in Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans), Hoult talked to Movieline about navigating that transition, learning how to swing a sword, and that angora sweater from A Single Man.
When you took daring projects like A Single Man and Skins, were they part of a conscious attempt to break out of an image people had of you a a child actor?
It's more that those were the things that came along that were interesting at that time. Obviously, there's a fear as a child actor of being washed up and failing, and by no means have I gotten out of that. At the same time, if you can do something interesting with good people and great actors, I don't think you have to completely lose who you were as a child. You tend to become a different person from eleven to twenty.
How did you remain a kid when most of the people you're working with and dealing with were adults?
I was very lucky in the sense that I managed to keep a very normal life outside of acting. I went to school and I stayed home and stuff. It's a slightly different setup for child actors in England as opposed to here -- in America, it becomes "a business" very early on. It's very intense and it consumes your whole family, whereas in England it's more laid-back. You don't suddenly become very pivotal in the industry -- you're still a normal kid, and acting is just what you do.
Did you find Tom to be an intimidating presence when you first met him?
I didn't. To be honest, I wasn't aware of his fashion background when I first met him. We had a dinner and sat down and spoke about the script, and I knew this was something so personal and autobiographical to him that it was fantastic to be a part of.
Maybe it's best that you didn't know hm beforehand. I mean, what do you wear to a first meeting with Tom Ford?
Luckily, I didn't know so I didn't overthink it. Even then, people ask, "Did you worry about what you wore to set in the morning?" But not particularly, because if you're waking up at five or six o'clock in the morning, you're not feeling too hot and looking smart on set is the last thing you'd think about. Although, Tom was always immaculate, as you might expect.
Did Tom specifically design the costumes for your character?
We had a great costume designer, Arianne Phillips, and they worked together. Tom is very hands-on in all departments and very specific of what he wants, and Arianne created this look where I pretty much wear white all the time, to represent the angelic side of him as though I'm the guardian angel to Colin's character. Colin's got this very specific neat look with his cuff links and his polished shoes -- it's kind of like his armor.
I'm sure you had an idea of who Kenny was going into the film, but how do those fashion choices -- and I'm specifically thinking of that angora sweater you wear in the classroom scene -- perhaps tweak what you have in mind?
When you create a character, everything gets layered in, and with this character, the appearance really helped in creating him. Once you've got those clothes on and the sixties haircut and California tan, then you start working on the accent, all those things begin to create Kenny from the outside in. Yeah, that angora sweater got a lot of attention, didn't it?
It's a little hard to ignore!
It would frizz up underneath the lights when it got hot, so we would have to hairspray it and stick it down. [Laughs] It got a lot of attention.
This isn't your first time doing an American accent, right?
No, I did it in a film called The Weather Man.
Do you feel like you've got it licked by now, or is is frustrating to sit opposite Colin Firth when he's allowed to use his British accent and you're not?
Yeah, it was! By no means did I walk into set and think, "Yeah, I can do this," because the last thing you want to do when you're an English person playing an American is to mess up the accent. People will come after you pretty hard for that. I wanted to get it specific to the era and more Californian, and I had a fantastic dialect coach who worked on that with me. I remember the first rehearsals sitting opposite Colin, and it's difficult when you hear an English accent to not let it throw you back into your own English accent.
Tom also shot you for the cover of Out magazine. Is Tom the photographer much different than Tom the director?
Slightly. They're similar, but he may feel more comfortable as a photographer -- not to say that he feels uncomfortable as a director, but he's been doing photography for so long and understands it very clearly. As a director, with us as actors, he was very freeing. He didn't waylay us with too much direction where we felt like we couldn't play with our characters and create something that was alive. With a photoshoot, obviously, it's very different: You haven't got a character to play, nor lines of dialogue.
In a photoshoot like that one, and to a certain extent in A Single Man, you're objectified somewhat. Are you comfortable with that kind of attention?
I think it's something that Colin played very well within his conception of the character, whereby it doesn't feel too uncomfortable, really. Obviously, there's a large age gap between our characters, but Colin plays it in a way where it doesn't feel that odd. Kenny's quite a predator as well, and wise beyond his years. He feels that people his age don't understand him, and it's George who he has a connection with.
I'm sure you've heard that MTV is developing an American version of Skins. What did you think when you heard that announcement?
I think it's fantastic, it just depends on how it works out. The great thing about Skins is that they got actors who were the right age to play the characters, and there was something fresh and new. Hopefully, that's something MTV will create with their version of the show, where it doesn't get sucked into being one of the many young adult dramas that are already on American TV.
The writers for the UK version were exceptionally young, weren't they?
Some of the writers were as young as 18 writing full episodes, which is fantastic. I think that's why it worked so well -- you have a young team of writers who've got their fingers on the pulse and know what's happening. A lot of the time, I'd be reading the scripts going, "Hang on, what does this word mean? What's this new trend?" I didn't try to keep up with what the writers were saying because they were so up to speed on whatever was the cool thing at the time.
You're also in the upcoming remake Clash of the Titans. Who do you play?
I play a character called Eusebius, who's the youngest of Princess Andromeda's personal guards. They go on the mission with Perseus to try to kill the Kraken. It's not a huge character, but it's something I wanted to do to understand how those epic adventure things work. It was a good learning curve, definitely.
What was it like to go from these intimate dramas to a huge effects film like Clash?
Definitely, the scale of it was completely different. To go from a 10-page dialogue scene sitting across from Colin and to have all this dialogue to chew over and mull over, and then have a film like Clash that's much more visual...it's very much about looking the part of a soldier and knowing how to stand with a shield and a sword.
That sounds like fun, though.
Oh, it's something fantastic! I'd stand on set sometimes and think, "This is ridiculous. We're getting paid to fight giant scorpions." It's like what you'd do with friends in the garden when you were seven years old, and somehow, you managed to end up doing it as a job.
[Photo Credit: Angela Weiss/WireImage]