![]() He hasn’t experienced a lot of things – and the second someone opens his eyes up to a different world and shows him a bit of kindness he changes. You do actually, hopefully, relate to him. “It’s certainly I think the first time that a film of this scale has humanised those sorts of characters. Hoult, however, concedes the radicalism more freely. Riley Keough and Nicholas Hoult in Mad Max: Fury Road. Very much a reflection of what’s going on in the world.” “Everybody’s looking for a sliver of hope and for most of these boys that’s the only thing they have. Theron, too, steers clear of generalisation. “Now we have another rendering of that, but it’s been a constant” while Joe’s kingdom is, “like all cults, invented to get people to die on your behalf”. The concept of a glorious battle death resulting in entry to warrior paradise is age-old, he says. Today, he’s careful not to be drawn too far on the contemporary echoes. Then the film got stuck in development hell after the dollar crashed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When Miller wrote the script in 1999, he conceived of Hoult’s character as a quasi kamikaze pilot. Luckily Max, who Nux initially co-opts as a portable bloodbank, intervenes, alongside Charlize Theron’s one-armed freedom fighter. Nux is, in fact, a suicide bomber of sorts, whose worship of the great wheezy leader, Immortan Joe (the movie is set in a ravaged post-apocalyptic future 45 years hence), means he dreams only of a “historic death” in which he will reach Valhalla through an act of homicidal martyrdom. Tom Hardy has said he channelled a wolf to play barking Max for Nux, Hoult opted for a puppy: “He’s very enthusiastic and committed and affectionate but also kind of clumsy.” Species? He thinks a labrador, but retracts when he twigs it’s probably just because of the ads (“This film was inspired by loo roll”). ![]() Likewise his Mad Max character, Nux, despite being a psychotic, terminally ill slave whose bald chalky skin is covered in tumours and a massive chest tattoo of a carbolic engine (he spent two hours in makeup each morning). The guns are more pumped, the giggle less nervous, but Hoult is still a genuine sweetie. Instead, Hoult speaks knowledgeably about daytime TV – in particular Homes Under the Hammer, Wanted Down Under and Come Dine With Me – and with studenty enthusiasm about food: “When I fall asleep I’m thinking about breakfast and then after breakfast it’s lunch and then it’s dinnertime with snacks in between.” At 25, then, he remains appealingly suburban despite the glam location (beach cabana at the Hotel du Cap, Cannes’s most exclusive) and rising star status ( X-Men, Clash of the Titans, Jack the Giant Slayer, Jennifer Lawrence’s ex).
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