Nicholas Hoult to play an existential zombie

From DHD – Remember that kid from About a Boy? His name is Nicholas Hoult, and he is rapidly becoming one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood. He’s playing Beast in X-Men: First Class; he landed the coveted lead role in Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Killer, and now he’s landed the equally sought after leading role in Warm Bodies, Summit’s feature adaptation of Isaac Marion’s novel. Jonathan Levine will direct, from a script he penned; Erik Feig and Gillian Bohrer are overseeing for Summit.

Hoult will play an existentially tormented zombie who begins an unlikely friendship with the girlfriend of one his victims, starting a chain reaction that could transform his whole lifeless world.

Book Jacket:

A zombie who yearns for a better life ends up falling in love—with a human—in this astonishingly original debut novel.

R is a zombie. He has no name, no memories, and no pulse, but he has dreams. He is a little different from his fellow Dead.

Amongst the ruins of an abandoned city, R meets a girl. Her name is Julie and she is the opposite of everything he knows – warm and bright and very much alive, she is a blast of colour in a dreary grey landscape. For reasons he can’t understand, R chooses to save Julie instead of eating her, and a tense yet strangely tender relationship begins.

This has never happened before. It breaks the rules and defies logic, but R is no longer content with life in the grave. He wants to breathe again, he wants to live, and Julie wants to help him. But their grim, rotting world won’t be changed without a fight…