The role Nicholas Hoult secured with a Stewie Griffin impression: “I had watched a lot of ‘Family Guy'”
Despite only being in his mid-30s, it feels like Nicholas Hoult has been around forever, which isn’t completely false, considering he made his screen debut almost 30 years ago.
An episode of the long-running medical drama Casualty and a bit-part in Julie Walters-led period drama Intimate Relations marked his first forays into the world of professional acting all the way back in 1996. Since then, he’s been a constant fixture on film and television.
The transition from child star to adult actor is an especially difficult one to navigate that’s tripped up countless promising talents over the years. However, Hoult showed no such issues as he evolved from co-starring with Hugh Grant in About a Boy and Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man to displaying impressive versatility in a number of different projects spanning multiple genres.
One of many beneficiaries to emerge from the Skins talent factory, Hoult has starred in the Academy Award-nominated A Single Man, zombie rom-com Warm Bodies, and played the author of The Lord of the Rings in the biopic Tolkien. In addition, he pursued an infamous band of outlaws in True History of the Kelly Gang and let his culinary fandom get the better of him in The Menu.
He’s also become a regular fixture in blockbuster cinema, whether he’s battling monsters in Clash of the Titans, toppling even bigger monsters in Jack the Giant Slayer, riding towards Valhalla in Mad Max: Fury Road, or antagonising the ‘Man of Steel’ as Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s Superman reboot.
No mention of his big-budget escapades is complete without mentioning his role as Hank McCoy in five X-Men flicks, which required him to be buried under a mountain of prosthetics and makeup. Although his human—and American-accented—form appears regularly, director Matthew Vaughn gave Hoult some very unusual instructions during the casting process on First Class.
“Matthew Vaughn asked me to do a couple of takes in an American accent, as you kind of saw with the character,” he explained to GQ, which is fair enough. After that, though, things got a little weird. “But then also to do a take doing an impression of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. I had watched a lot of Family Guy in my teen years growing up, so I was like, ‘OK, I think I’ve got a pretty good impression of Stewie Griffin lined up.'”
Maybe it was some kind of test designed by Vaughn to see if his prospective McCoys could pull off the character even while sounding like a super-intelligent baby with homicidal tendencies who was originally modelled on Rex Harrison. Either way, Hoult “did a whole version of the take as Stewie Griffin and sent it off,” which thinks might well have helped him get the gig.
