Nicholas Hoult, most recently seen barreling along the Fury Road to Valhalla, is about to make a detour into isolation and hermitry. Not an actual hermit, but the closest thing in 20th century letters: J.D. Salinger. Hoult will play the famously reclusive author in a biopic, Rebel in the Rye. “The movie will explore the life and mind of the secretive author and tell the story of the birth of ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ The story will explore his rebellious youth, his experiences on the bloody front lines of World War II, enduring great love and terrible loss, a life of rejection to the pages of the New Yorker and his writer’s block — which led to a spiritual awakening,” reports Variety.
Salinger’s life continues to be an enigma. The novelist published very little in his lifetime and nothing after 1965. His last interview was in 1980, and he died in 2010, having lived as a recluse for many years in New Hampshire. His most famous creation, Holden Caulfield, is a disaffected, pretentious adolescent, disdainful of ‘phonies’ and whose most famous influence, sadly, was on John Lennon’s assassin.
