Nicholas Hoult tipped to play young JRR Tolkien
ENGLISH actor Nicholas Hoult is reportedly in negotiations to portray a young J.R.R. Tolkien in Fox Searchlight and Chernin Entertainment’s upcoming biopic of the author.
The fi lm, aptly titled “Tolkien”, is set at the outset of WWI and chronicles the formative years of the orphaned author as he befriends a group of outsiders at school, just in time for the war to threaten to tear them apart.
These experiences would later inspire Tolkien to write his famous Middle-Earth novels, including “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” book series, which were later adapted into two Hollywood trilogies from Peter Jackson.
He eventually joined the army and was summoned to France in 1916. Tolkien taught at Oxford for nearly 20 years while writing “The Hobbit” and the two fi rst volumes of “The Lord of the Rings”.
Finnish fi lmmaker Dome Karukoski is attached to direct from a script by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford.
“Dome can confi rm the information in the Deadline article but he can’t confi rm or comment on anything else,” Helsinki Filmi CEO Annika Sucksdorff told AFP.
One of his nation’s most critically acclaimed fi lmmakers, Karukoski, 40, directed this year’s “Tom Of Finland” , which portrays the life of a prominent gay fi gure in the 20th century. — AFP