Nicholas Hoult was preparing for Batman audition when he heard Robert Pattinson had been cast

Losing a job you really wanted is hard under any circumstances, but finding out you lost that job on the radio just days before you were supposed to audition—to Robert Pattinson no less—sounds like something that would only happen to a perpetually unlucky character on a sitcom. Unfortunately for Nicholas Hoult, this fictional nightmare situation is his reality. The silver lining is that he has a lot of great material if he ever decides to flip to the writing side of the biz one day.

On a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, via Variety, Hoult confirmed that he was driving in L.A. when he heard that Robert Pattinson was the top choice for Matt Reeves’ The Batman. “Yeah of course it’s an emotional blow,” he said. “Your imagination does not know… you are aware on a practical level: ‘I know I am auditioning against Rob.’ And Rob is fantastic in that movie. That was the right decision. But you get excited by the prospect.”

While on this side of the business we love to speculate about which names are being put forth for all the big upcoming roles, it’s “a lot to put yourself through emotionally” as an actor, Hoult said. “You get excited by the prospect… There’s a weird period before you can get to the acceptance and see the movie and be like that was the right choice, you go through the period of ‘What could I have done different? Why not me?’ You run through all those things.” (Previously, he did tell GQ that “I don’t think I would have done as good a job as [Pattinson] ultimately.”)

Luckily for Hoult, he’s been given the great responsibility to take on a few other Batman adjacent roles recently. He’ll get the bat aspect out of his system in Nosferatu, coming later this month, and is set to appear in a different comic book movie as Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s upcoming Superman. “James Gunn is such a fantastic director and I was so excited by what he was building at DC,” Hoult shared. “When we spoke…because they knew I had been through [the Batman] process, they didn’t want me to necessarily have to go through that again. That was very kind of them. There was an element of them being like, ‘We like you as an actor. We want you to be in this world.’”