Nicholas Hoult was certain someone had made a mistake.
Clint Eastwood wanted to talk to him about starring his new film, a slow burn legal thriller about a normal guy faced with an extraordinary moral dilemma. Surely Eastwood meant someone else, he thought. But soon enough they were chatting on the phone about “Juror #2,” opening in theaters Friday.
“I was so nervous,” the British actor said. “I remember saying to him, “I really like the script.” I was so eager to please.” For Eastwood’s comeback, Hoult slipped into a pitch-perfect impersonation of his gravelly voice: “If you like it so much, I guess I’ll have to read it.”
Suddenly Hoult was laughing. The tension was broken. “I was like, wow this guy’s cool,” he said. “He’s got a great sense of humor and we’re going to get along.”
Though there may be a healthy amount of English self-deprecation in the story, the spirit of it isn’t unique to Hoult. Eastwood, 94, is the kind of living legend that has even the most seasoned veterans a little starstruck. “Juror #2,” his 42nd film behind the camera, is getting strong reviews for being a smart, original courtroom thriller about an impossible conundrum.
In the original script by Jonathan Abrams, Hoult’s character, a recovering alcoholic with his first child about to be born, gets selected for jury duty on a murder case. But when the facts start to emerge, so do his memories and he’s forced to confront the possibility that he might have been unknowingly responsible. “After the first read it had me,” Eastwood wrote in an email. “It made me think about what would you do if you were put in this situation? What is right? What is wrong? Who would you protect? A true moral dilemma. That’s something I’d want to watch.”
And he started rounding out his cast, led by Hoult who he called a true “movie star,” with supporting turns from Toni Collette as the ambitious prosecutor, Chris Messina as the public defender, J.K. Simmons as a fellow juror as well as Zoey Deutch and Kiefer Sutherland, who wrote a letter asking if there might be a role for him.
“He’s not efficient for the sake of being efficient,” Sutherland said. “I think Sydney Pollack, for instance, was really efficient and kind of when he became known for being efficient, started trying to show off his efficiency. … I think Mr. Eastwood just kind of looks at a set and looks at a scene and just finds the straightest way to shoot it.”
Much has been made about whether “Juror #2” is going to be Eastwood’s last film. But he’s not saying that, publicly or privately. In fact, when production went on hiatus during the actors strike, he didn’t even use that time as a break.
“I remember when we did come back from the strike, I was like, ’What did you do? And he was like, ‘Well, I was looking for new material,’” Collette said. “It’s nobody’s position to say this is his last movie.”
Sutherland added: “His parking spot at the Warner Bros. lot isn’t going anywhere.”