Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult are having a great time, pun intended, on “The Great”.
Fanning and Hoult catch up with Entertainment Weekly for the publication’s digital cover shoot ahead of the season two premiere. Hoult dishes on how his character’s less savoury features come to the forefront in the sophomore season.
“That was really fun for me in some of the scenes this year,” Hoult tells the publication. “Watching that more venomous, ruthless, demanding, and entitled side of the character then come to the forefront. And Elle was so wonderful at doing that in a really funny way.
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“That was a joy to watch because it weirdly felt like a reversal of some of the stuff we did in season 1 with how Peter would be towards Catherine.”
Fanning is a fan of their characters chemistry, for better or worse.
“I think you should ship it,” Fanning, who plays Catherine the Great, admits. “They are a complicated bunch. Because it’s also like, at any moment, you don’t know if they’re going to murder each other. It’s like ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’ in the 18th century.”
It is really a metamorphosis for Hoult’s character, Peter III of Russia.
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“He’s shredding away a lot of what made him who we’d come to see in season one,” Hoult teases. “He’s getting rid of [the throne], which he realizes he never really wanted anyway, and becoming much freer in himself — obviously still with his manic and strange qualities.”
“Obviously, he messes up a lot and does terrible things. What’s fun about the character is even though his observations and his musings and everything are ridiculous at times and horrible, they’re very honest and truthful,” he adds. “You always know where you stand with him.”
Season two of “The Great” premieres Nov. 19 on Hulu.
