Nicholas Hoult: I found out before audition that Pattinson had won Batman role

Nicholas Hoult has revealed that he found out on the radio that fellow British actor Robert Pattinson would be playing Batman before he could have his own audition for the part.

The 34-year-old, who rose to fame in About A Boy and Skins, before going on to historical series The Great and superhero film X-Men: First Class, was up for the role of the Caped Crusader in Matt Reeves-directed 2022 movie The Batman.

Hoult told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that it was an “emotional blow” to find out he would not be playing Batman.

He said: “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, ‘Well, It’s not confirmed yet, I’m auditioning next weekend’. I was like, ‘Give me a chance’.”

Hoult said blockbuster casting can be “a lot to put yourself through emotionally”, and it is “weird” that when actors audition it gets into the public domain quickly.

He said: “Your imagination doesn’t know (but) you are aware on a practical level, ‘I know I am auditioning against Rob’. And Rob is fantastic in that movie, and I think that was the right decision but also you get excited by the prospect.

“Matt is a fantastic director and the script and everything. I was like, ‘This is going to be a cool movie and I want to be a part of it, and 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 have to go through the period of, ‘What could I have done different? Why not me?’ You run through all those things.”

Hoult said he had been “hesitant about going through” auditioning for a similar role again, but decided to go up for the Superman reboot, directed by James Gunn, in which he has been cast as evil businessman Lex Luthor.

He said: “When we (me and James) spoke, because they knew I’d been through that process, they didn’t want me to necessarily have to go through that again, which is very kind of them.

“There was an element of them being like, ‘Hey, we like you as an actor, etc, etc. We want you to be in this world’, and so it was like a nice element of going through to screen test.”