Nicholas Hoult Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for The Red Sea International Film Festival Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Nicholas Hoult opened about his fear of succumbing to the fate of child actors after his break out role in the 2002 Hugh Grant dramedy About a Boy, revealing that "everyone [back] then, even as a kid, everyone talks to you about how child actors stop working, their life goes off the rails and [how] it doesn't work out as adults. You have this kind of fear of what's to come." The 36-year-old British actor reflected on his almost three decade career as a mainstream star during a "In Conversation With" talk event at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah on Monday. Related Stories Movies Red Sea Film Foundation CEO Faisal Baltyuor On Building an Entertainment Ecosystem in Saudi Arabia Movies Park Chan-wook on 'No Other Choice' Snagging 3 Golden Globe Nominations, State of Korean Film Industry Hoult began the talk by detailing his childhood, revealing that he lived in a household that loved musical theater and acting. He briefly talked about his first audition as a 5-year-old for Philip Goodhew's 1996 film Intimate Relations and then talked about his time working on Paul and Chris Weitz's About a Boy as an 11-year-old. After confessing his fears of making it in the business despite the good notices for his performance in the Nick Horby adaptation, Hoult said that the talk around him at the time, and being aware of the failure some child actors did play on his mind. "Even then I knew I wanted to continue [acting] but I was like there's a good chance this doesn't work out," he said before adding, "Luckily my parents and my family were wonderful in the sense of they sent me to a normal school and kept life around acting as regular as possible, so there was never like this pressure to succeed." In About a Boy, Hoult starred alongside Toni Collette, the Aussie actress who played his character's mother. Hoult remarked on the "special" nature of meeting Collette as a child, and working with her again twenty years later. "She played my mum in [About a Boy], and then we did a movie two years ago called Juror No. 2, that Clint Eastwood directed. It was lovely to reunite with her. These people that have known me since I was a kid, but now I'm a completely different person. Now I get to know them again as an adult, which is really special." The talk moved on to Hoult's time on the revolutionary British teen TV drama Skins, the show that launched the careers of a dizzying number of now established actors including Daniel Kaluuya, Dev Patel, Jack O'Connell, Hannah Murray, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Kaya Scodelario and Joe Dempsie. Hoult had just missed Kaluuya at Red Sea Film Festival by a few days and remarked that "one of the wonderful things about Skins is that I made some of my best friends for life from that show." Describing his Skins character Tony Stonem as a "piece of work", Hoult reflected on his time working on the show fondly. "We all were like 16 or 17-years-old, living away from home for the first time in Bristol. We grew up together. No one expected that show would take off the way it did. It was the first drama that was made for [the Channel 4 youth orientated channel E4]. The script was great, it was a good team but no one expected it to [be so big]. What was unique about it was that we all went in with no expectations, we were just having fun. On his move into franchise acting, Hoult reveals the quirk of fate that led him to be securing the role of Beast in in Matthew Vaughn's 2011 hit X-Men: First Class. "One of the things that led to [playing Beast] was Tom Ford's first movie A Single Man. After that I was actually cast in Mad Max, but we had to delay the filming because we were meant to shoot in Australia but we had to move it to Namibia. So then I called my agents and said I needed a job. And they said there was interest in you playing Beast in X-Men. I had to do an audition for that for that in Australia the next day, and I jumped on the plane for a screen test and it all worked out." Once again reminding people how young he actually is despite his seemingly veteran status as a mainstream star, Hoult said he grew up watching the X-Men movies and loved the comics. He shared one particularly "crazy" moment for him on the set of 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past. "I was in the Cerebro corridor with James McAvoy playing Xavier, and then I looked over and it was Hugh Jackman as Wolverine [standing there]. I was [thinking] this is the guy that I was watching play Wolverine when I was 11-years-old and now I'm standing next to him and you know it was really like an out of body experience, a bit like tripping. It was really bizarre, it's like 'oh I'm reliving my childhood, but in real time.'" Ask