I JUST LIKE LEECHES AND ANYTHING THAT DRINKS BLOOD, BASICALLY…
all blood-sucking creatures.
Hoult speaks with his friend and costar about picking up diverse skills beyond acting on set, dealing with having scenes cut, and working with iconic actors as a child.
I would like to start with something that I NICHOLAS HOULT: think will make Elle laugh: Guess what I’m doing at the moment? I’m practicing my calligraphy. I’ve got my quill here, my ink. It’s going terribly, as always. This goes back to when we were shooting The Great, and there was a scene where I had to sign over Russia to Catherine. Behind the scenes, I guess I was meant to have been practicing my penmanship, my quillwork, because I’m truly terrible at it. And I said to Elle in between takes, “Oh, because you’re so good at it.” And she was like, “No, really I am,” and I was like, “BS, it’s so difficult. What’s going on here?” Turns out, Elle had calligraphy lessons when she was a kid, and writes out the Russian word for Catherine in the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen in my life.
You had to eat your words! ELLE FANNING:
You were like, “Now you write Peter.” And I didn’t even NH: know how to write Peter in English, let alone in Russian, and it was just dots of ink and blobs and horrible squiggles.
Do you have to [write using calligraphy] in a scene? EF:
It is for a scene, but now I know that I’m terrible, so I told NH: them, just as a heads up, “This isn’t really my thing, if you want someone to do this.” [Laughs.]
You have to learn how to do so many different things as an EF: actor—that’s the fun of it. Nick, you love to learn new activities; I would say that’s probably one of your favorite things about acting.
That’s similar for you as well, right? What’s your favorite NH: skill that you’ve learned?
I had to play the trumpet for Ginger and Rosa, but they cut it EF: out of the scene. I trained for months; I was supposed to play trumpet and then I didn’t. But I liked the process of it! That was fun, it was so unusual, and it was something that I never would have done in real life. I had to ice-skate for Somewhere, and that was probably the one I felt most proud of, because I did a whole routine.
Any that you’ve kept up? NH:
Nope! [Laughs.] I leave that in the dust. But you ride your EF: motorcycle! You scoot around on that all the time.
Yeah, I learned to ride a motorcycle when we did Young Ones. NH:
That was the skill I’ve kept, and I was happy to have learned.
And you’re a very good dancer! You do some dancing in Renfield. EF:
Cut! Gone. There was a whole dance sequence that we NH: practiced for weeks. It was a dream fantasy dance sequence. We shot it all in one night, we had all these amazing dancers, and then it’s not in the film.
That’s showbiz, though, isn’t it? That happens all the time. EF:
Sometimes the things you’re most excited about get cut.
It’s been a bit of a learning curve for me; when you get NH: really attached to things in the script, and you put in a lot of effort to learn them, or whatever it might be, and then it just doesn’t work in the end.
Oh, completely. I’ve definitely had that feeling before. But when EF:
I’m acting, I’m editing in my brain at the same time. So sometimes, maybe it’s not scenes that are completely cut, but they’re edited in a way that wasn’t what was in my head. That, for me, can be hard. Inevitably, there’s always a reason for it, but you do get attached to the way that you see your vision. Even when you come into work, and I’ve been imagining the scene a certain way, then the blocking is completely different, the location looks nothing like I imagined it. But that’s kind of a part of having to be spontaneous.
I think I kind of edit along. But there are definitely times NH: when you’ll do the scene and you’ll be so in it emotionally.
And then they’ll come to you like, “That was great, but we couldn’t see your face.” So you have to keep some sort of awareness; that’s the trick.
Oh yeah, I had a scene once—it was a 10-page scene, crying EF: hysterically, one of those big scenes. We finished the take, and everyone was like, “This was incredible; this was it.” They weren’t rolling. But we’re just like, “Okay, we just have to do it again.”
You’re good at being objective about that, though. You’re NH: always watching edits of the show, and keeping on top of stuff like that, making sure that scenes are really paying off in the right way.
I enjoy that part. I think we really understand each other; it EF: feels very safe and comfortable. Doing a show like The Great, you have to be very uninhibited, and working together in the scenes that we have to do, we’re not embarrassed; we’re very uninhibited together and feel like we can try things out. We’re both going to push each other and challenge each other and be honest with each other. I think we’re both very brutally honest, which I respect more than anything. If it’s bad, I want [you] to look at me and be like, “Tone it down,” and I’ll do the same for you.
There’s trust and an ability to push each other and expect NH: a lot. We’re both kind of competitive and think of acting almost in terms of an athletic sort of thing, at times, so it’s showtime when you get to set. We have similar approaches to being on set, and are also willing to laugh and take the piss out of each other without upsetting each other. We both know that the other one’s capable of really great stuff, so we’re willing to push and try for that and reach for it, but then also admit that sometimes it goes wrong.
I will ask you—i’m warming you up for the press tour when EF: they ask you about this—what’s your obsession with vampires? Are you one? Is that why?
[Laughs.] That’s it. I just like leeches and anything that NH: drinks blood, basically. Mosquitoes, all blood-sucking creatures.
I remember you telling me that you had to eat bugs for Renfield. EF:
I did. I ate quite a lot of bugs. They’re dried-out and flavored NH: crickets, though, so they were pretty tasty, to be honest with you. Salt and vinegar was the best; there was a barbecue flavor. But the one that I didn’t like was a potato bug that hadn’t been flavored, and that tasted quite buggy. It was quite big as well. They were all dried and dead though; I wasn’t just randomly picking bugs off the floor.
If you were a real actor, you would’ve. EF:
They made little caramel cockroaches—those were the NH: best ones, actually, apart from that they get stuck in your teeth, but it looked exactly like a cockroach made of caramel. We had this discussion, though, because you were eating dirt in The Great. The food and prop team are amazing in terms of a dedication to creating these beautiful things for us to eat. There were two times I put my foot down, though: It was the chicken hearts, because I was like, I don’t want to eat 50 chicken hearts today if I can help it, and when they had the lard ice cream. I’d been looking forward to it for ages, and I was meant to be gobbling it down, and the fake ice cream they’d made was room-temperature, gritty sugar lard.
Are you doing a crazy accent [in Nosferatu]? EF:
You know me; I always flirt with an accent, so I was doing NH: that. Then I was working with a dialect coach, and they were like, “Don’t do that. That’s terrible. That’s offensive.” [Laughs.] No, they were much more political about it; they’re like, “It’s good what you’re doing, but it doesn’t necessarily help us with the story.” I think it was me consciously being like, I’ve just done Renfield; I don’t want to end up in the same realm as that. But then I was like, that’s silly: Renfield is an action comedy set in modern times and is almost like a spoof, and Robert Eggers is doing a very serious Nosferatu, a Gothic horror movie. They’re different; I’ll be different naturally. But I was trying too hard. Do you ever have that?
Yeah, and you also create problems for yourself that no one else EF: is thinking about. You’re thinking too far ahead. But you had an English accent in Renfield?