First pics of Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in new biopic

J.R.R. Tolkien is having a moment. Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, an exhibit dedicated to the author’s work, is currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Amazon is spending half a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings series, and Fox Searchlight has readied a biopic about the author’s early life. USA Today has the first pictures of Nicolas Hoult (Beast from the X-Men movies, Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road) as the man himself. Take a look:

Naturally, Tolkien is standing in front of a wall full of made-up languages and fantastic creatures.

That’s Hoult with Lily Collins, who’s playing Tolkien’s wife Edith. The two fell for each other while Tolkien was still a teenager, but he didn’t propose until he was 21 on the request of his guardian, who considered Edith a bad influence. She was engaged at the time, but broke it off for him. Their star-crossed romance inspired Tolkien’s tale of Beren and Lúthien, about a human and an elf who fall in love. The pair stayed together the rest of their lives; the names of Beren and Lúthien and even inscribed on their tombstone.

Tolkien participated in World War I, which is probably what we’re looking at here. Some scholars think his experience of that famously bleak conflict inspired figures like Sauron and the grim land of Mordor.

And here’s Tolkien palling around with some chums at Oxford, probably talking about dragons or something.

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Although Tolkien became famous for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his first love was always The Silmarillion, the tome of foundational mythology organized and published by his son Christopher after his death in 1973. “I don’t much approve of The Hobbit myself, prefering my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature,” Tolkien once wrote to colleague Professor John Ronald Reuel. John McQuillen, the curator of the New York exhibits, elaborates to The Daily Mail:

"For him, The Silmarillion, the history of the elves, was always the most important work. The Hobbit was a side project, a story he told to his kids that was for them. It was only later that it finally was published. And The Lord of the Rings also is a publication demand. It’s not anything he actually wanted to do.But The Silmarillion was always his heart. The creation of the elvish languages, the history of the elves, it was always a major disappointment in his life that that was never published in his lifetime, because The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were complete side projects."

Will Fox’s Tolkien touch on this surprising tidbit? We’ll see when the movie is released into theaters on May 10.

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