When asked what Grant is like to work with, Nicholas
replies, "He's neurotic about everything, and he
improvises a lot. I didn't keep up with him a lot of the time.
The first time he did it, I was standing there like a fool. He was
asking something strange and trying to get a reaction. But it
failed, because I went the wrong way. He never tried that
again!" Grant's character Will effectively becomes
Marcus's surrogate father. So does Nicholas reckon Grant would
make a decent father in real life? "No," he says,
with the careless frankness of youth. "I don't think
he'd be very good at being a dad. I think he's more of a
brotherly type of figure. "There was one scene when me
and Hugh were playing snooker and I had to make sure the white ball
stayed down one end of the table, so he could stay on camera. I
actually got it in the pocket and he turns around and goes,
'Hey! You actually got it in! I don't believe it -
you're the worst snooker-player in the world!' "And there was one time I was doing my lines with Hugh on
the doorstep, and I messed them up . . . again! I turned around and
said, 'Shit' quietly, but my microphone picked it up, and
everybody heard it. " There's a brief pause while
Nicholas thinks for a moment, and then he concludes,
"Hugh's more corrupting than in the film." At
this point, the three adults in the vicinity - journalist, mother
and PR - practically faint, for their various different reasons. But
just as I'm scenting a celebrity scoop, Nicholas spoils it for
me: "He got me into golf. Lots of people in the film played
golf and everybody was always talking about it. I just thought I
ought to give it a go, and then I got into it, and Hugh bought me a
set of Wilson Pro clubs. I use them all the time, now." About a Boy was, by all accounts, an exceptionally happy
production, and paradise for an 11-year-old boy, as Nicholas was
then. One of his co-stars was Rachel Weisz, a legend in
the pre-teen community for her roles in the two Mummy epics. This
did Nicholas no harm at all with his classmates. "I was
talking to people at school and they were going, 'She's
well fit!' I got a poster from The Mummy Returns signed by
Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, and everybody, which was really
good. I got that framed." Then there was the grand cast
and crew cricket match, with which the production's closing was
celebrated. "Everybody else was wearing their
'all-right' whites. But then Hugh turned up with, like, a
proper cricket jumper and everything. He was actually quite
good." The high-point of Nicholas's friendship with
Grant came when, as he Nicholas puts it, "I made the biggest
decision of his life: which car to buy. "He got two
Aston Martins brought to the set one day. There was a silver one
with red leather, and there was a racing green convertible, with
cream leather. He borrowed that one for the weekend and I got to sit
in it. Then we found out there was an even faster one, so he ordered
that instead." The odd Aston here or there hardly
matters when you make as many millions as Hugh Grant. Nicholas
Hoult's income, however, is a closely-guarded secret, not least
from himself. "He doesn't know what he's earned and
he's not interested," says his mother. "It
just goes into his bank-account. The first small part he played, he
bought himself a bike, but apart from that he's never bought
anything. He was going to get a Play Station after this film, but
then the Weitz brothers, the directors, bought him one anyway.
It's the doing it that interests him, not the money." "I'd just like to carry on acting," says Nicholas,
who has no new parts lined up at the moment. "The fame thing is
just something that might happen. I like the fact that you might get
given stuff. Hugh said that it was good being a star, because he got
a free set of Calloway golf-clubs, custom-fit and everything." | 
