FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, THE ACTOR HAS FOUND HIMSELF DRAWN TO THE DARK AND THE DISTURBING… AND THE STRANGE. NOW, AS HE PLAYS POWER-HUNGRY MANIAC LEX LUTHOR IN SUPERMAN, HE TELLS US WHY NORMALITY IS HIS KRYPTONITE

WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL

Nicholas Hoult, photographed exclusively for Empire on 1 May 2025 at Hubble Studio, Los Angeles.

MONICA MAY

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 Mad: 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.

Your work is becoming increasingly… strange. That’s a compliment, by the way.

(Laughs) Oh good!

Is that deliberate? Is the morally complicated-grey-area stuff what you’re personally interested in?

Yeah, definitely. That’s what I find interesting to explore just in terms of how humans function: the weird things. The ways we behave, how people condone their behaviour, or explain it, or don’t explain it to themselves. But from an outsider’s point of view, going in there and being like, “How can I try and figure out what’s going on there?” It’s like being a little detective. It’s just exploring different realms of what it is to be human. Also, I think that’s more frequently than not the sort of film I like. I can’t exactly describe what itch it scratches for me. [Films where] there’s more going on under the surface than I can fully understand, or I’ve learned something, or I’ve got a different perspective. That’s probably it.