English actor Nicolas Hoult has been building up an excellent body of work over the past couple decades. He broke out as a child actor alongside Hugh Grant in 2002's About a Boy, he was charming as a young Beast in several X-Men movies, he nearly stole the show as the war boy Nux in 2015's fantastic Mad Max: Fury Road, and now he's in Nosferatu as Thomas Hutter, the innocent real estate agent who comes face to face with the deadly vampire. Next year he'll play Lex Luthor in Superman. He can't be stopped.
And he could have been even bigger. Speaking with Nosferatu costar Lily Rose-Depp over mega-spicy hot wings in an episode of Hot Ones Versus, he revealed that he auditioned for multiple roles back in the day when director Chris Columbus was casting actors to appear in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
"I think I got to the point where I auditioned with ," Hoult recalled. "He didn’t remember this, it wasn’t even a memorable audition. I think I said, 'Hey, I auditioned for Harry Potter. Still waiting to hear back… I think I’m kind of going to age out of it soon.'
"I remember doing a couple of auditions, and then meeting him and maybe having fake glasses for the audition. Not getting the role of Harry, and then maybe coming back and [them] being like, “Will you audition for Malfoy?” I don’t think I got that either, and then they were like just gradually audition for every role in Harry Potter until they were like, “No.”"
Hoult is indeed around the same age as Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Tom Felton, Robert Pattinson and other actors whose careers got a big boost early on thanks to roles in the Harry Potter films. I could have seen him doing well in that franchise. But obviously things turned out well for Hoult regardless.
And again, they're just getting better. Nosferatu is in theaters now and by all accounts is a great spooky time, perfect counter-programming for the holidays. And come next July, he'll go full bald as Lex Luthor in Superman. And from there he could spin things in pretty much any direction he wanted.
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