C&C 62: Hoult for the Holidays

Turns out the actor was my Secret Santa

As 2025 dawns, Nicholas Hoult has to feel pretty good about the year ahead, with a role as Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s Superman on tap. (Although he may want to heed cautionary advice from Jesse Eisenberg, who believes playing the supervillain in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice [2016] “actually hurt my career in a real way.”) It will be the biggest showcase to date for the actor, who made a huge impression as a child in About a Boy (2002) and will ride eternal, shiny and chrome, thanks to Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). And it comes on the heels of a strong 2024, with turns in a trio of films released late in the year. I watched all three over the holiday break, seeing so much of Hoult that I probably should have bought him a Christmas gift.

Nicholas Hoult out on a ledge in Nosferatu

Nosferatu is the hit of the bunch, a surprise Yuletide success. F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 silent film is a copyright dodge, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that hews closely to the novel’s plot. Hoult plays Jonathan Harker Thomas Hutter, a newlywed who ventures to Transylvania to close a real-estate deal only to fall under the spell of a vampire, Count Orlok, with designs on Hutter’s young bride. Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse) brings his customary intensity and attention to detail to bear on a story he’s long burned to tell. Hutter’s fraught journey to Orlok’s redoubt is suffused with dread, depicted in shots—a horseless Hutter striding up a snowy mountainside, or faltering at a crossroads in the dead of night—that resemble woodcuts illustrating Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Eggers also amuses himself with casting choices that nod at the history of these twinned stories; Hoult starred as Renfield (2023) opposite Nicolas Cage’s Dracula—the familiar in Eggers’ film is played to creepy effect by Simon McBurney—while Willem Dafoe, the Van Helsing surrogate in the remake, portrayed Max Schreck, Murnau’s Count Orlok, in Shadow of the Vampire (2000).

An unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård is the new Nosferatu. Eggers’ take on the character, visually and thematically, differs from the iconic original, leading to some complaints. The theater where I saw the film was cheekily playing Norma Tanega’s “You’re Dead”—the theme to What We Do in the Shadows—as I took my seat. Skarsgård’s Orlok has the same mighty mustache as Kayvan Novak’s Nandor on the sitcom, plus a similar grandiloquent manner of speech. But any impulse to laugh was snuffed out by Skarsgård’s thunderous, echoing voice and imposing presence. His Orlok is stripped of backstory; he is variously described as death incarnate, the personification of plague—the disease blamed on the legion of rats¹ that do his bidding—and, in the Count’s own words, “an appetite, nothing more.”² With Orlok not a character so much as a force, the film’s focus shifts to the mere mortals in his thrall. The result is a uniquely Catholic take on vampire lore, but then all of us who were raised Catholic are like the proverbial man with a hammer: everything looks like guilt. Hutter is daunted at the prospect of providing for his new wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and mortified by his weakness before Orlok, while Ellen fears that her secret shame—a lifelong attraction to the darkness—has manifested this mayhem. She asks Dafoe’s professor if evil comes from within or from beyond, a potent question to put at the heart of a lushly appointed horror film.

Juror #2 generated attention for the token theatrical release Warner Brothers gave to what is likely Clint Eastwood’s final film. It’s also earned plenty of praise. I have to admit that the opening scenes, shot with the indifference of a Lifetime movie, raised concern. And the sequence establishing the borderline preposterous but undeniably compelling hook—Hoult’s Justin Kemp realizes that he may be responsible for the death at the center of the trial he’s been assigned to as a juror—feels almost defiantly pedestrian. But a more flamboyant approach, akin to a John Grisham thriller, would fly in the face of Eastwood’s point: that our institutions are made up of human beings who, at best, are doing their best, and as such are fallible.

Toni Collette and Hoult in Juror #2

Screenwriter Jonathan Abrams ably stacks the deck—that’s not a knock!—creating plausible and compelling reasons for Kemp, a recovering alcoholic, to be in this plight, which are reinforced by a strategically deployed Kiefer Sutherland as his AA sponsor. Hoult feasts on a self-serving but persuasive argument about how truth and justice are not the same; Kemp has done nothing wrong, but if he comes forward his past will be used against him while his efforts since will be disregarded and undone. (Adding to the impact of this scene: the D.A. to whom Hoult makes his case is Toni Collette, who played his mother in About a Boy.) Juror #2 is at times far-fetched, but when it ended Rosemarie and I spent half an hour hashing out its ethical quandaries, which counts for something.

The strongest of the films by far is also the least known. In the true-crime The Order, Hoult is chilling as Bob Mathews, the leader of the title white supremacist group which carried out a series of crimes in the 1980s including the execution of Denver radio host Alan Berg (played, in an inspired piece of casting, by Marc Maron). A grizzled Jude Law is fantastic as the (fictionalized) fed on Mathews’ trail; while Hoult may have just worked with Eastwood, it’s Law who calls to mind the laconic charisma of the Man with No Name. The beats of The Order are not surprising—with the exception of Mathews reading The Turner Diaries to his son as a bedtime story—and the movie doesn’t pretend otherwise. Director Justin Kurzel knows that genre films, even those based on fact, are about the singer not the song, and he infuses each heist and shootout with a sense of genuine danger. There’s terrific location work throughout, Alberta doubling for a host of seedy, nondescript Pacific Northwest settings. A lean and timely piece of work, The Order is one of 2024’s best movies.

Hoult in The Order

Hoult wasn’t mentioned in Devin Gordon’s recent New York Times op-ed on how Hollywood may have finally replenished its dwindling supply of male movie stars in 2024, but he could have been. He plays expectant fathers in both Juror #2 and The Order, and in each film his character addresses a gathering of friends from the deck of his home. At 35, he’s the right age to embody men young enough to still see promise in their futures but old enough to fear that the die may have already been cast, the kind of roles George Clooney or Brad Pitt can’t take on any more.

Damn. I really should have bought him something for Christmas.

What I’m Reading

Alter Ego, by Alex Segura (2024). Alex follows up his justly-acclaimed Secret Identity (2022) with a book tied to its predecessor but standing firmly on its own. Identity unfolds against the backdrop of the struggling comics industry of the 1970s, while Ego is set now, in the era of media consolidation and franchise fatigue. Annie Bustamante is a comics artist turned filmmaker whose latest production is mothballed, Batgirl-style, by a penny-pinching Hollywood studio. An unlikely lifeline is tossed her way: a chance to reinvent the Legendary Lynx, the character whose origins are detailed in Identity. To bring her dream project to life, she’ll have to tangle with a once-storied filmmaker facing a #MeToo-driven reckoning, shady business interests, and the still-unsettled ghosts behind the Lynx’s creation. Alex’s love of comics lore as well as his savvy about how the business has evolved over the decades come through loud and clear in this worthy successor.

Next, three interrelated articles. A detailed look at n+1 by Will Tavlin on how Netflix’s movies, “destined to be autoplayed on laptops whose owners have fallen asleep,” have Hollywood teetering on “the brink of irrelevance.” Hat tip to the Sunday Long Read. (For what it’s worth, I watched two Netflix originals over the holidays, Carry-On and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and didn’t fold laundry during either of them.) Matt Goldberg suggests that David Fincher’s hands-off deal with the streamer has diminished his legacy. That said, I’ve been thinking about The Killer (2023) lately, and may give it a rewatch. And while this Letterboxd interview with Fincher needs a copy editor—it’s “mail carrier” and Garanimals—it’s packed with great practical advice, like the value of “passionate detachment” in creative life and learning that “you can’t want something more than the people who are going to finance it because then they got you.” Plus I love the story of Morgan Freeman selecting his switchblade in Se7en, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year.

1. For what it’s worth, I saw a record number of the rodents on my walk home from the theater. Maybe they were looking for the afterparty.

2. More like Noshferatu, am I right?