In Renfield, a comedy slasher about Dracula’s lickspittle victim, Nicholas Hoult eats insects for his super-strength, which is prodigious. He decapitates and disarms with ease, his eyes flash amber as his power grows, but otherwise he plays it with a self-effacing British charm so pure that it’s like watching Hugh Grant rebooted.
In a hotel in central London to talk about the film, he looks – well, first of all, weirdly young. His breakthrough role, in 2002, was Grant’s titular co-star in About a Boy, though he appeared in his first film, Intimate Relations, six years before that, when he was five. So, he has now been in the business for nearly three decades, but, at 33, he has not just the face, but also the self-effacing manners, of someone much younger, as if he’s living his own, personal vampire story and got bitten by a svengali a century ago (or maybe by Grant in About a Boy?).
