How Nicholas Hoult Was Lured Back For ‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’

Nicholas Hoult is returning as Hank McCoy in X-Men: Dark Phoenix, and things are going to be different for the bouncing blue Beast this time around.

Hoult’s contract with 20th Century Fox was up after X-Men: Apocalypse, Hoult’s third time playing Beast. Hoult was lured back for more by the promise of an interesting new direction for the character from Simon Kinberg.

“It’s very different for Beast this time around, and that was part of the appeal for doing the movie for me,” Hoult tells Entertainment Tonight Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival (see the video above). “Simon Kinberg, who wrote and is directing this time, and he has great ideas for where he wanted the character to go, so it was exciting.”

Hoult’s fellow X-Men co-stars Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, and James McCoy were all in the same contract situation following X-Men: Apocalypse. All four ended up signing on to return in X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

Lawrence says she decided to return because she felt she owed it to the X-Men fans.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is currently filming in Montreal and, according to Hoult, still has about four weeks of production left. Fox has been quite secretive about the project, which will be Kinberg’s directorial debut.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is based on “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” arguably the most popular X-Men story of all time. While Beast was a member of the Avengers and not the X-Men at the time that “The Dark Phoenix Saga” took place, he left Avengers mansion, making sure the Avengers would not be alerted to the events taking place, in order to come to the aid of Jean Grey and the other X-Men.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix currently has a 3.79 out of 5 ComicBook.com User Anticipation Rating, making it the tenth most anticipated upcoming comic book movie among ComicBook.com users. Let us know how excited you are for X-Men: Dark Phoenix by giving the movie your own personal ComicBook.com User Anticipation Rating below.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix is scheduled to open in theaters on Nov. 2, 2018.