Superman’s Nicholas Hoult Reveals Heartbreaking Way He Learned He Lost Batman Role

Nicholas Hoult shared on Happy, Sad, Confused with Josh Horowitz how losing out on The Batman to Robert Pattinson effected him. Hoult explained that while he was driving, he heard over the radio that Pattinson was the top choice to play the iconic Gotham hero, which Hoult was scheduled to audition for that next week. He called the news an “emotional blow.”

“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,” Hoult shared. “And I was like, ‘It’s not confirmed yet! I’m auditioning next weekend. Like, give me a chance.’”

Although Hoult lost out on playing Batman, he can be seen next in James Gunn’s Superman, the first movie in the rebooted DCU. He originally auditioned for the role of Superman but Gunn realized afterward that he could be a better fit for one of Superman’s greatest enemies, Lex Luthor.

“James Gunn is such a fantastic director and I was so excited by what he was building at DC,” Hoult added. “When we spoke…because they knew I had been through [the Batman] process, they didn’t want me to necessarily have to go through that again. That was very kind of them. There was an element of them being like, ‘We like you as an actor. We want you to be in this world.’”

Reeves’ Batman film, which released in 2022, is highly regarded as one of the best films on the DC slate. It became a commercial success, earning over $771 million worldwide, making it the seventh highest-grossing film of 2022. Pattinson and Reeves will team up for the sequel which is slated to release in 2026, a four-and-a-half year time difference between the original and the follow-up.

“Yeah, of course it’s an emotional blow. Your imagination does not know … you are aware on a practical level: ‘I know I am auditioning against Rob.’ And Rob is fantastic in that movie,” Hoult said. “That was the right decision. But you get excited by the prospect. Matt [Reeves] is a fantastic director and the script. It’s a cool movie and I want to be a part of it. It’s 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 go through the period of ‘what could I have done different? Why not me?’ You run through all those things.”