Nicholas Hoult cries easily and laughs at nothing – except Pete Davidson

Nicholas Hoult is easy to make cry. Making him laugh, on the other hand, is apparently a different matter.

“I’m very sentimental,” the British actor tells The National. “It’s very easy to make me cry.”

Hoult has been on screen since he was a child, growing from the wide-eyed youngster in About a Boy into one of Hollywood’s most versatile leading men. He’s played a doomed war boy in Mad Max: Fury Road, a scheming politician in The Favourite and Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor, moving between blockbuster spectacle, period drama and comedy along the way.

“I’ve noticed something,” Hoult continues. “Particularly with reading scripts or doing scenes: it’s normally the simpler the dialogue or the simpler the sentiment being expressed, the more deeply it affects me, and the more that I am likely to cry.”

And what makes him laugh?

“Nothing.”

His How to Rob a Bank co-star Anna Sawai is more easily amused. She’s also quick to admit that, like Hoult, she has no trouble shedding a tear.

“Anything about life, death, love will make me cry,” she says. “I’m always thinking about that stuff.”

There is at least one exception to Hoult’s rule about laughing: Pete Davidson. The comedian and actor is part of the bank-robbing crew in How to Rob a Bank, and took his co-stars to see him perform stand-up while they were filming.

“We went to see two of his stand-up shows, and so we laughed a lot at him because he’s a great comic,” Hoult says.

Show caption: Nicholas Hoult stars as Ryan, a bank robber who live streams…

The film comes from David Leitch, the director behind Bullet Train and The Fall Guy, and has the action and humour that audiences have come to expect from his work. But there’s also heart beneath the spectacle, with Hoult and Sawai playing a couple whose lives are tied together on and off the job.

Hoult’s Ryan leads a gang of bank robbers who film their heists and share them online, turning their crimes into a social media sensation. Sawai plays his partner Emi, while Davidson and Rhenzy Feliz complete the crew.

The videos bring them a following, but they also attract the attention of a veteran FBI agent, played by John C Reilly, and Zoe Kravitz's software engineer. With the two closing in, the gang prepare for an even more ambitious robbery.

Show caption: Nicholas Hoult and Anna Sawai, centre, lead an ensemble cast…

For Hoult, one of the pleasures of working with Leitch was seeing how he brought the two sides of the gang’s life to the screen. The director used cameras attached to the actors to capture the frantic robberies, while scenes away from their online exploits were shot with a calmer, more static style.

“I loved the opposing natures of that and what David did with that,” Hoult says. “Seeing how you can tell these stories differently visually was exciting.”

Sawai, who won an Emmy for her performance as Mariko in Shogun, found that playing Emi gave her a chance to learn from the people around her.

“I feel like I was getting tricks from everyone around me on how to transform,” she says. “Until playing this character, I feel like I was always playing characters that were more similar to who I am in real life.”

How to Rob a Bank is now showing in UAE cinemas