Nicholas Hoult ate BBQ crickets & caramel cockroaches on Renfield
Nicholas Hoult is currently promoting Renfield, yet another adaptation (of sorts) of the Dracula story. This one is a comedy told through Renfield’s perspective, that of Dracula’s bug-eating errand boy and “familiar.” Hoult plays Renfield and Nicolas Cage plays Dracula. Hoult signs on to the weirdest movies, I swear, but he seems to prefer doing the offbeat stuff and eschewing the big movie-star roles. Anyway, Hoult rarely gives magazine interviews and the only reason he agreed to this one (I believe) is because his costar Elle Fanning conducted it. They get along very well – not in a shady way, just in a “two costars who are friendly” sort of way. Some highlights from the interview:
Why he signed on to Renfield: “With Renfield, I thought it was a fun take because Renfield is normally a secondary character, and I was like, ‘How fun to explore these codependent, toxic relationships in this scenario—a work environment between Dracula and his familiar.’”
There was supposed to be a dance scene in Renfield: “Cut! Gone. There was a whole dance sequence that we practiced for weeks. It was a dream fantasy dance sequence. We shot it all in one night, we had all these amazing dancers, and then it’s not in the film….It’s been a bit of a learning curve for me; when you get really attached to things in the script, and you put in a lot of effort to learn them, or whatever it might be, and then it just doesn’t work in the end.
He ate a lot of bugs on ‘Renfield’: “I ate quite a lot of bugs. They’re dried-out and flavored crickets, though, so they were pretty tasty, to be honest with you. Salt and vinegar was the best; there was a barbecue flavor. But the one that I didn’t like was a potato bug that hadn’t been flavored, and that tasted quite buggy. It was quite big as well. They were all dried and dead though; I wasn’t just randomly picking bugs off the floor. They made little caramel cockroaches—those were the best ones, actually, apart from that they get stuck in your teeth, but it looked exactly like a cockroach made of caramel.”
Whether he’ll do an accent in Nosferatu: “You know me; I always flirt with an accent, so I was doing that. Then I was working with a dialect coach, and they were like, “Don’t do that. That’s terrible. That’s offensive.” [Laughs.] No, they were much more political about it; they’re like, “It’s good what you’re doing, but it doesn’t necessarily help us with the story.” I think it was me consciously being like, I’ve just done Renfield; I don’t want to end up in the same realm as that. But then I was like, that’s silly: Renfield is an action comedy set in modern times and is almost like a spoof, and Robert Eggers is doing a very serious Nosferatu, a Gothic horror movie. They’re different; I’ll be different naturally. But I was trying too hard.
Working with Cage again as an adult: “I was so excited for him to be coming in to do this, because that was a crazy experience when I was 14, to work with him then [on The Weather Man]. I think at that age, I hadn’t seen a lot of his work, and I wasn’t fully aware of quite how iconic Nicolas Cage was, so it was nice to get to work with him again. I’m almost more in awe of him the second time—but then also, to see him as Dracula is pretty incredible, because it’s such an iconic role, but then you put Nicolas Cage into it, and it doesn’t get more iconic, in many ways, than those two combined. And also watching the way he works—where his inspiration came from, his dedication—it was really wonderful, and I was very happy to get the chance to work with him again and have a front-row seat.
It’s a really nice piece – he’s chatty and curious about Elle and they talked a lot about the transition from child-acting to adult acting and it sounds like they have so much fun working together. As for the flavored crickets… people always say that crickets are edible and whatever, but I had no idea that the props department would add different flavors to dried out crickets? Like, that blew my mind?? BBQ flavored crickets, salt-and-vinegar crickets. And caramel cockroaches.
Hoult is such a quiet babe. His six-pack abs, my god.
Cover & IG courtesy of L’Officiel.
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