EBENEZER Director Ti West Explains What Makes Johnny Depp’s Scrooge So Different with a Wickedly Charming Edge
Johnny Depp is taking on Ebenezer Scrooge, but director Ti West isn’t interested in giving audiences another version of the miserable old miser we’ve already seen countless times.
With Ebenezer, West is leaning into the supernatural roots of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol while giving Scrooge more dimension. Depp still gets to be cruel, grumpy, and difficult, but there’s humor and charm underneath all that nastiness.
West may seem like an unexpected filmmaker to tackle Dickens after making horror films such as X and Pearl, but he’s loved A Christmas Carol since childhood. During an interview with EW, West said:
“I used to read it every year, and when I was a kid, I liked it more as a ghost story than as a Christmas story because when I was young, I saw the George C. Scott TV movie and Marley really freaked me out. It was one of the earlier horror-adjacent things I had seen.”
That early experience helped shape his approach to Ebenezer, particularly its supernatural visitors: “I’ve always thought no one’s really made the movie version where the ghosts are a little bit spooky,” he explained.
Of course, none of that works without the right Scrooge. West found his in Depp, who happens to have his own longtime affection for Dickens’ story and particularly loves the 1951 adaptation starring Alastair Sim.
“He’s the movie, really,” West said. “The Dickensian dialogue has a certain musicality to it, and I just think Johnny has that cadence and that musicality to the way that he performs. And I thought, ‘I don’t know if he’d ever want to do it.’ And so we sent it over and he also coincidentally happened to be obsessed with it his whole life.”
The performance marks Depp’s first role in a major Hollywood release since his 2022 defamation trial with ex-wife Amber Heard, and West believes the actor brought exactly what he hoped for.
“Having made the movie with him, I was right: The musicality is what is in the performance, and he brings a different thing to it than anyone else has done. It’s uniquely him, but it’s also very reverent of the text.”
Depp’s version of Scrooge apparently doesn’t soften the character simply to make him easier for audiences to embrace. Instead, West and screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern wanted to make his unpleasant behavior understandable, even when it’s difficult to defend.
“He has a way of hitting all of the classic Scrooge moments that make him an unlikable guy, but there’s a certain sense of humor and charm to it as well,” West explained.
West wanted the movie’s morality to be a little messier than the simple idea that Scrooge is terrible and everyone around him is wonderful. He added:
“In other adaptations, Scrooge is kind of an asshole, and then the rest of the characters are benevolent, perfect people. And it was really our goal to try to balance that out to say that there’s much more of a gray area in the story. We want to give Scrooge logic and a good argument, so when he is making an argument about something, he’s not wrong.”
The audience may hate what he does while occasionally catching themselves understanding exactly why he does it. West said:
“As his Scrooge cuts someone down verbally or as he makes a financial point or withdraws, you do understand why he’s doing it. You kind of agree with him even though you shouldn’t.
“That’s, I think, what makes this special. You find yourself liking a character that you’re not supposed to on paper, which then brings you as the audience into the movie more because you’re experiencing the movie subjectively as he is, rather than just seeing it as a play.”
The ghosts are getting distinctive personalities as well. Tramell Tillman, who previously performed in several regional productions of A Christmas Carol, plays the Ghost of Christmas Present.
“A big part of what he brings to the character is a sense of him having a finite amount of time to be in the story — that his time is limited to be with Scrooge. His perspective is a little bit more like, ‘I don’t really care if you learn your lessons because I deal with people like you all the time.’ He’s almost in a Groundhog Day.”
Tillman’s ghost apparently has places to be and only so much patience for Scrooge. “He has a little bit of a sense of, ‘In my brief time that I’m here to do this with you, I want to get the show on the road, and I also want to enjoy what I can because my time here is limited.’
“So they have a very different dynamic than everybody else in the film. We really tried to give each of the ghosts a specific personality, and he has that.”
Ian McKellen plays Jacob Marley, marking the legendary actor’s first appearance in a production of A Christmas Carol during his seven-decade career.
“I didn’t know if he would want to do it, and I also was really trying to figure out if he’d ever done it before. He made the same joke about all of the other British actors that have done it, but he had just never done it. And he was very game.”
McKellen’s Marley doesn’t sound particularly pleasant either, which fits West’s interest in characters who aren’t easily divided into good and bad. West explained:
“Marley is really kind of a son of a bitch in the movie, and he plays that in a somewhat likable way that you shouldn’t [like him], but it’s really great. You do get a sense of that character’s pain in the movie when he comes to visit Scrooge.”
The movie will also give audiences something most adaptations don’t spend much time on, Marley before his death. “In this version, we have a scene with Marley alive,” West teased.
Rupert Grint takes on Bob Cratchit, and his relationship with Scrooge looks like it will carry a good chunk of the film’s emotional weight.
“He’s a core emotion in the movie, for sure. I think he brings a certain sympathy that you have for him that maybe you don’t have in some of the other versions, because I think you do get a sense of what it’s like to have this job where he’s kind of the whipping boy of the job for a long time.”
He added, “Bob would love to not have this job, but he has a family with a lot of kids and he can barely provide for them as it is. So he’s just got to go to work and take it, which I think is something that everyone can relate to in some way. And he plays that with such a really great pathos in it. He is one of the main hearts of the movie.”
West explains he isn’t trying to tear Dickens’ story apart and rebuild it into something unrecognizable. His goal is to remain faithful while bringing his own filmmaking instincts to the material.
“I love the book, so I’m really not trying to do a spin on the story that is not faithful to the story or is some sort of meta tweak on it. It is genuine. It has its own perspective, and it has its own places where it deviates a little bit. And stylistically, I do certain things with it that are maybe in my wheelhouse, but they’re all very much in reverence of the text.”
The first Ebenezer trailer naturally invited comparisons between Depp’s Scrooge and some of his famous eccentric characters, but West says, “It is its own thing.
“The tricky thing with somebody like Johnny and a teaser like that is it naturally does evoke a lot of really other iconic things. I don’t think a lot of those other iconic performances really relate to this — in the same way that they don’t relate to one another.”
He continued, “The idea of him doing his thing, in a way, is still prevalent. But it’s not Captain Jack. It’s certainly not Wonka. It’s not Edward Scissorhands. It doesn’t feel like any of those. But you do feel like the mercurial guy that created those things is doing his take on Ebenezer Scrooge.”
While West gets to play with the darker, ghostly elements that originally attracted him to A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer also gives him a chance to hit emotional territory that his horror movies rarely explore. West went to to say:
“There’s some really genuine, heartfelt moments that are, for one reason or another, not in The Sacrament or X. For me as a filmmaker, and it’s certainly coming from making a lot of scary movies, you are manipulating the audience’s emotions in a way.
“This is just a different kind of emotion. It’s a bit of nostalgia. It’s a bit of loss. And there’s joy in the movie at the end as well. I genuinely think there are two to four scenes in this movie that I have watched people I don’t know cry while watching them.”
This sounds like a fun way to revisit a story that has already been adapted more times than Marley has rattled his chains.
Ebenezer hits theaters November 13.
