When a screen giant the stature of Clint Eastwood requests time for a chat about a potential lead role, an actor doesn’t dilly-dally around and say let me get back to you.
In-demand actor Nicholas Hoult leapt at the chance and admits he was surprised that Eastwood came looking for him to star in the provocative courtroom thriller “Juror #2,” which marks the Oscar-winning director’s 40th time helming a film.
After reading former San Francisco Bay Area screenwriter Jonathan Abrams’ multi-layered script and talking to Eastwood, Hoult booked it to Georgia to play morally challenged Justin Kemp, a soon-to-be dad who realizes he might be the real guilty party in a murder trial in which is serving as the titular jurist.
The crackling good conversation starter, which asks audiences what they would do if put into Justin’s unfortunate shoes, opens Nov. 1 in select theaters.
Right before the film received its world premiere last weekend as the closing night selection at the AFI Fest, Hoult — known for Hulu’s “The Great,” George Miller’s “Max Max: Fury Road” and a series of “X-Men” films — chatted about how rewarding it was to work with the 94-year-old Eastwood, and shared the helpful advice the movie icon gave him.
“What’s wonderful about Clint as a director … and his confidence as a filmmaker, is his ability to let the audience think and spend time to just kind of sit with it and go ‘OK, we’re not going to force anything upon you here. We’re just going to show you the kind of facts of the story and then you can take them apart and figure what you want from it.’”
That’s been a trademark in Eastwood’s illustrious directorial canon — from his 1992 Oscar-winning Western classic “Unforgiven” to his more recent 2019 truth-based “Richard Jewell.”
One of Hoult’s favorite exchanges with Eastwood came when the director asked him about acting and his approach to it.
“He said: ‘You know, it’s an emotional art form. You don’t overthink too much. You just do.’ And that always stuck with me. … There was a moment later on (while) shooting where he kind of walked past me as we were about to do a scene and he said: ‘What are you thinking of? What’s in your head?’ And I said: ‘Absolutely nothing.’ And he said: ‘That’s my kind of actor.’”
Hoult found Eastwood’s calm and assured demeanor to be a help in quelling his own tendency to become more self-critical of himself as an actor.
“Me and the neurotic elements of my nature (say) I always can do better. I can could do this. I could do that,” the 34-year-old British-born actor said.
Eastwood tempered that interior dialogue by saying, often after just one take, “‘that’s good. That’s gonna work. We’re gonna do that.”
It was a refreshing change of pace for Hoult.
“Hopefully some of that has washed off on me because he’s such a wonderful actor but also director. I think his ability to be calm and go ‘no, that’s it,’ and accept rather than kind of always try and battle like I did. It was a real special energy to be around.”
The role of Justin the juror particularly appealed to Hoult since he confronts a moral quandary that tests the moral quality of his character.
“I think most of us like to believe that 99 percent of the time we’re good people and we’ll do the right thing,” he said. “I think the wonderful thing about this story is you put someone who (has) a difficult past but has moved on from it, you put them in a scenario where you go, what would you do? I think the great thing about the film is it really holds a mirror up where hopefully people watching it can project themselves into that scenario and figure out what you would do since it’s not an easy position that Justin gets put into.”
Justin lands in a no-win situation in the juror box as he realizes he might have been the driver whose car struck and killed Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood, the director’s daughter) on a dark and stormy night. His situation only worsens since he’s a recovering alcoholic and was at the rowdy dive bar where Kendall and her boyfriend (Gabriel Basso) argued before she was killed.
A prosecutor (played Toni Collette, who reunites with Hoult after working together on 2002’s “About a Boy”) views the case as a potential boon to her district attorney aspirations.
The trick in portraying the ever-more anxious Justin was to avoid overplaying his agitation, since the character isn’t a “showy” guy.
“It’s very internal the struggle that he’s going through, which is obviously difficult because as an actor you want to express as much as possible but at the same time you have to internalize it because of the scenario he’s in.”
The ambiguity of Justin appealed to him as well, with audiences wondering later on whether he’s the hero or maybe even the villain of the story.
“It’s interesting what you will do to protect yourself,” Hoult said, adding that Eastwood deftly handled the moments in the story when the audience starts to waffle about the gray area that Justin inhabits. “It’s like OK, maybe your first judgment of someone wasn’t necessarily right,” says Hoult. “And I think that’s something we all experience in life. Sometimes we like to label people very quickly … and then when you spend time and really kind of dig down a little bit, maybe none of the first perceptions were right.”
Hoult is a big fan of Eastwood’s work and can recall “running around the house” when he was young while Eastwood’s spaghetti Westerns — “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” — were playing on TV. He also recalls getting wrecked after watching “Million Dollar Baby” (Eastwood’s second Oscar win as director; the first being for “Unforgiven”).
“I mean he’s just made so many brilliant movies,” Hoult said. “I feel very lucky to have got to spend time with him as a person, but also being part of his legacy and history means a lot to me.”
Audiences will be seeing a lot of Hoult in the near future — in very different roles. In “The Order,” out Dec. 6, he co stars with Jude Law and is both chilling and charismatic as white supremacist Bob Matthews; in Robert Eggers’ eagerly awaited update of the Gothic thriller “Nosferatu,” out Dec. 25, he’s Thomas Hutter. And in July 2025, he’ll star as DC’s iconic villain Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s “Superman.”
It’s been one busy year for Hoult who was literally finishing one film just in time to start the next. But he is hardly complaining.
“There was a very different experience with all of them,” he said. “It just shows that filmmaking, directing, acting, all those things, there are so many different ways to create.”
