The one actor Nicholas Hoult has always wanted to emulate: “I love watching him”
They say “never meet your heroes”, but the artistic connection between Nicholas Hoult and the actor he admires most suggests otherwise.
In a recent interview, Hoult revealed his admiration for the actor Willem Dafoe, going back long before they worked together in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, in which Hoult plays estate agent Thomas Hutter and Dafoe the controversial Swiss Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz.
Hoult confessed that he adored watching Dafoe’s lack of “predictability” on screen. “I think he’s so brilliant, and I love watching him,” he said. Hoult isn’t the only actor who admires Dafoe, whose impressive filmography spans multiple decades. Actors like Robert Pattinson and Pedro Pascal have also admired his portrayals of unique, often outlandish onscreen characters and performances.
There are undeniably clear connections between Hoult and Dafoe. Both aren’t afraid to genre-hop from superhero movies, with Dafoe playing the Green Goblin in Spider-Man and Hoult playing Beast in X-Men, to art house horrors and dark comedies, like Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, but also his earlier film The Lighthouse, in which Dafoe stars alongside Robert Pattinson. Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite saw Hoult star alongside the director’s favourite, Emma Stone as royalty. Both actors have been lucky enough to traverse that precarious line between blockbuster and art house, while many other actors have found themselves trapped in their niche.
The two have also been able to carve out eccentric personas for themselves, garnering a cult following and critical acclaim in the process. Known for their unconventional, quirky, risky roles and offbeat genre-blurring films like Dafoe’s roles in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, and Hoult’s in zombie romcom Warm Bodies and another vampire film, Renfield, they are two actors at the top of their game.
Even their performances bear a similarity, with both Dafoe and Hoult able to shift between creepy villainous anti-heroes to charismatic, comedic characters who are often on the sidelines or don’t fit into conventional society. Hoult described Dafoe as “the other guy”, not “the normal guy in any movie”, something he wanted to emulate.
Speaking about why he hadn’t been cast as a conventional romantic lead, Hoult acknowledged the similarity between the two actors’ niches: “I don’t think I’m necessarily quite the conventional anything. That’s probably a good thing. In terms of the actors that I adore watching, they don’t do things predictably,” he told Empire.
“That’s not to say that I don’t want to do some romcoms and those sorts of things,” Hoult mused, “But when I look at the page and people describe a character as ‘charming’, I’m like, ‘Well, how do you… I don’t… My brain doesn’t understand that’. That’s probably where the weirdness comes from.”
Although the pair didn’t get much airtime together in Nosferatu, there is a clear charismatic persona connection between the two, making their onscreen presence sure to work well together. It’ll be interesting to see if the two are cast alongside each other in closer proximity in the future, and what sort of new shoes they step into.
