Download Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

 

Nicholas Hoult didn’t think he had an aversion to heights until he found himself shuffling on a narrow beam 30 feet above the ground while filming a scene for “Jack the Giant Slayer.”
“My character has a fear of heights, but I didn’t think I had one,” says the 23-year-old actor. “I’m not the most balanced of people and it was swaying on ropes.”
He had a wire attached, but he also heard a voice in the back of his head. “You’re like, ‘I don’t want to fall off,’” he remembers thinking to himself.
Hoult better get used to the view from up there, because his career is definitely on the ascent.
The soft-spoken Brit has been toiling in the business since the ripe old age of 8. But Hoult is all grown up now.

In 2011’s “X-Men: First Class,” he played the big-footed, acrobatic Beast. Up until then, he was best known to American audiences as the titular foil for Hugh Grant in “About a Boy.”
And within the span of a month, Hoult has landed atop two new movies. He plays the lovestruck zombie in “Warm Bodies” — yes, that’s him under all that makeup — and now he’s the beanstalk-climbing farmboy in “Jack the Giant Slayer,” which opens Friday.
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Not to mention all the unwanted attention from paparazzi during his relationship with “X-Men” co-star Jennifer Lawrence.
“I’m really not worried about it. I live a very normal life out in the country in England,” says Hoult, who adds that he adamantly keeps his private life to himself.

His friends, he says, “are [teasing me] at the moment because I’m on a lot of buses in London right now.”
There will be more buses coming along. He just wrapped “Mad Max: Fury Road,” opposite Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. Soon he’ll start production on a sequel to “X-Men: First Class.”
It was while working together on that superhero movie that producer Bryan Singer secretly was auditioning Hoult for something... bigger. Singer, who had just signed on to direct “Jack the Giant Slayer,” found his storybook hero.
“He showed that he was very charismatic, but he also had a great vulnerability to him as young Beast and I knew that it would translate very well into the Jack character,” Singer says.
Like Jack, Hoult in real life comes across as a shy, respectful young man having stumbled on the hen that lays the golden eggs.
“Running around on the set of ‘Jack,’ it’s literally like being a kid pretending to fight giants and dragons and people trying to make that as realistic as possible,” he says, laughing. “It’s ridiculous that this is a job.”