Nicholas Hoult recently spoke about losing the Batman role to Robert Pattinson. It seems he found redemption with the Lex Luthor role in ‘Superman.’
Hoult revealed on the ‘Happy Sad Confused’ podcast that he was driving in Los Angeles when he heard Robert Pattinson was the top casting choice for the Batman role in Matt Reeves’ ‘The Batman.’ Hoult was shocked to hear this because he was going to audition for the role.
“Yeah, of course it’s an emotional blow,” he said about losing out on Batman. “Your imagination doesn’t know… you are aware on a practical level: ‘I know I am auditioning against Rob.’ And Rob is fantastic in that movie. That was the right decision. But you get excited by the prospect. Matt [Reeves] is a fantastic director, and the script… it’s a cool movie, and I want to be a part of it. It’s a brilliant character. There’s a weird period before you can get to the acceptance and see the movie and be like, ‘That was the right choice.’ You go through the period of ‘What could I have done differently? Why not me?’ You run through all those things.”
Hoult said auditioning for a big comic book role is “a lot to put yourself through emotionally.” He added, “I remember a week before we did the Batman test, I was driving in my car, and I had the radio on, and they were talking on the radio about how Rob was going to be the new Batman. And I was like, ‘It’s not confirmed yet! I’m auditioning next weekend. Give me a chance.’”
Hoult will not be portraying Batman, but he will play Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s upcoming “Superman” movie. “I’m a fan of Superman and Lex Luthor as a character, so hopefully we’ve done something special with it that people enjoy,” Hoult said. This version of Lex Luthor is expected to be a ‘mad scientist.’
The actor originally auditioned for Superman before he and Gunn realized a better fit might be the iconic villain. Hoult credited Gunn for making the ‘Superman’ audition process a smooth one. “James Gunn is such a fantastic director, and I was so excited by what he was building at DC,” Hoult said. “When we spoke… because they knew I had been through [the Batman] process, they didn’t want me to necessarily have to go through that again. That was very kind of them. There was an element of them being like, ‘We like you as an actor. We want you to be in this world.’”
With Reeves behind the camera and Pattinson front and center, “The Batman” earned rave reviews and $770 million at the worldwide box office. Hoult previously told GQ España that Pattinson “did an amazing job” in “The Batman,” adding: “I don’t think I would have done as good a job as him ultimately. I don’t think I could have fit as well into the world that Matt created as Rob did.”
