Nicholas Hoult in a scene from the movie Mad Max: Fury Road.

Nicholas Hoult says he lied to land a role in the new Mad Max movie.

The grown-up child star was instructed to tell a story at his audition and so he borrowed one from his actor pal Liam Cunningham, who once attended a wedding in Ireland that almost cost a grandfather his life.

"The bride got grease on her skirt and they got petrol filtered out of a tank to get this grease off and then they poured it down the toilet," he says.

"She was fine, she went down the aisle. But then the grandad of the family, he liked to smoke a pipe, so he went to the toilet at one point... sat down on the toilet, lit his pipe, had a puff and then threw the match in the toilet and it exploded.

"He had to be carried out on a stretcher. It was, like, this huge disaster story, and the whole time, like, the casting director was looking around the camera, going, 'No way'.

"I told it as if I was there. I lied."

Hoult, who plays the shy Hank McCoy in the X-Men movies, stars as the psychotic thug Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road.

- WENN