NICHOLAS HAS TSAR QUALITY
NICHOLAS HOULT will be donning his smart new black-velvet, doublebreasted Armani tuxedo on Monday — and spending the night at home.
The actor is in the running for a Screen Actors Guild award for his masterfully wry portrait of Emperor Peter in the completely wicked TV drama The Great. Elle Fanning plays his wife: Empress of all Russia, Catherine the Great.
‘There’s a lot of fluffing about going to awards shows,’ Hoult told me recently. ‘It’s nice to be doing it at home.’
The SAG citation follows a Golden Globe nomination. ‘I was surprised most voters had a clue who I am!’ he said, with genuine modesty. But I’m not.
The 31-year-old has been giving spoton performances in everything from The Favourite (he had the best wigs) to Mad Max: Fury Road and True History Of The Kelly Gang; demonstrating an admirable ability to totally disappear into a role. That was something Tom Cruise spotted, too. Hoult was to have worked with Cruise on the latest Mission Impossible feature that’s shooting now. But the pandemic upended schedules, and Nicholas was committed to the second season of The Great (the pair ‘spoke and had a good chat’ after the unavoidable change of plans).
‘The whole thing came about because I’d auditioned for Top Gun, and then Tom Cruise called me after he saw the screen test,’ he explained.
They worked together on pre-production for M:I 7. ‘At some point, we’ll hopefully figure out how we can get together, down the road,’ he said.
Hoult enjoys working with Fanning on The Great. Despite the fact that Peter and Catherine are hilariously mismatched, ‘there are some true emotions’ at play — ‘and some weirdly sweet moments’.
He finds his character ‘fairly unlikeable’, but he does enjoy the surreal side of the show — something he attributes to the scripts by Tony McNamara (who shared an Oscar nomination with Deborah Davis for their screenplay for The Favourite).
I still catch myself chuckling over one of Hoult’s lines in the programme, when the emperor decrees that he wants to change the name of the month of July to . . . Peter.
The Great is available on All4 (not all episodes), and Starz via subscription.