Aristocratic dickhead typecasting

My wife and I are two episodes into The Great, the TV show about Catherine the Great that seems like an attempt to give us The Favourite: The Series. Both this series and Yorgos Lanthimos' best picture nominee are about 18th century aristocracies where the aristocrats are cruel, crass and lascivious.

It also helps that they both feature Nicholas Hoult.

It almost seems like they cast him just to be sure to cement the comparison for us. But it's not like there aren't other signs that Hoult has been trending in the direction of this sort of typecasting. In fact, the guy you once knew primarily as one of the X-men is more commonly found in much different type of material nowadays.

Not only is there The Great and The Favourite, but Hoult can be seen as a dickhead of antiquity in this year's True History of the Kelly Gang as well -- though the antiquity in this case is not qute as ancient, only late 19th century Australia, and the constables of that period only act like aristocrats.

I say, let's keep it going.

I have long appreciated Hoult as an actor, dating back to the year (2013) I named him as one of my three who had a good year in my year-end wrap-up post. He was in two genre movies that I liked rather more than I probably should have, in retrospect, those being Warm Bodies and Jack the Giant Slayer (which both made my top 20 of the year). Those performances were clearly just scratching the surface of what he can do.

The reason he is so good at malicious aristocratic twits is that he has an effortless supercilious quality to him. He'd just as soon dismiss somebody, both literally and figuratively, as breathe. His characters ooze cruelty.

Although The Great, a TV show, is prompting this post -- scandalous on a movie blog -- I do think this could be his crowning achievement in that regard. Now granted, we are just two episodes in, but almost every time Hoult opens his mouth as Peter III, I laugh -- sometimes even when it is awful to do so. It's not that I always think the things he says are funny, though I frequently do. It's that it's funny that someone would say the things he says in the first place, because they're just so damn wrong.

In fact, I'm sure I would have included an image from The Great rather than this still from The Favourite, except I couldn't find an image from The Great that encapsulates what I wanted to talk about today as well as this.

Although I am specifically not going back and checking my history to find out what happens to Peter III -- though I know it can't be good -- I am kind of hoping he sticks around long enough to entertain me for a while longer.

Nicholas Hoult has been entertaining me throughout his career. As he is only 30 years old, I look forward to all the great aristocratic dickheads he will play in the future.