Nicholas Hoult’s most embarrassing audition: “No, I think we’re good”
Nicholas Hoult has come a long way since his breakout role as the wise-beyond-his-years blue-eyed Marcus in About a Boy.
Now 35, the British actor’s career is really taking off, with significant roles in Tom Ford’s A Single Man, critically acclaimed arthouse films like Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Robert Egger’s adaptation of Nosferatu, and high-profile blockbuster action gigs in X-Men: First Class, Mad Max: Fury Road, and most recently, the latest Superman.
It’s a heady, fast-paced time for Hoult, whose schedule over recent years has been pretty full juggling filming for Hulu’s hugely successful comedy The Great, in which he stars as the man-child husband of Russia’s 18th-century ruler Catherine the Great, played by the excellent Elle Fanning, and raising his two children with wife and actress Bryana Holly in California.
But before he got his time in the spotlight, the actor was struggling to land roles. There was obviously Skins, in which Hoult plays Tony, the selfish anti-hero and older brother of the elusive and self-destructive Effy in the first series of the show, earning him a cult following among wannabe British teenagers, but the show failed to break him into the Hollywood circuit.
It was around this time, like most struggling actors, that the actor’s agents began fighting for anything that would stick. So they sent him in to read for 90210, the CW reboot of the Beverly Hills, 90210 teen drama series, which ran from 1990 to 2000.
The reboot took a similar format to the original, introducing a new group of rich students in the upper-class community of Beverly Hills (the name of the show derives from the area’s zip code) as they went through the ups and downs of teen life into adulthood.
According to Hoult, when he arrived at the studio for his audition, the waiting room was packed with dozens of actors his age nervously running lines. “I did one reading, and then they were like, ‘Great, thanks’,” he recalled, “I was like, ‘Should we put it on tape?’ And they were like, ‘No, I think we’re good’.”
We may never know why he was rejected by the studio. Perhaps it was his English awkwardness, or that they had gotten wind of his role as Tony in Skins, and his character’s dark personality, warding off any signs of the actor becoming the soft romantic lead of his era.
The 90210 remake played on the typical American heartthrob, best embodied by the misunderstood and perfectly chiselled surfer Liam Court, played by Matt Lanter and inspired by Dylan McKay of the original Beverly Hills, 90210.
In a 2023 interview with The Guardian, Hoult later revealed he‘d love to play a romantic lead, but hasn’t landed the part yet, perhaps a nod to his rejection from the 90210 remake. Instead, the actor seemingly continues to turn to the role of the villain or quirky leads, both of which he’s undeniably good at.
Luckily, he can put the audition behind him, like many successful actors of his era who have had to have a go at the dirty work to get to the good, meaty stuff.
