How “Ebenezer ”star Johnny Depp makes Scrooge ‘an unlikable guy’ with ‘humor and charm’

Wesley StenzelMon, August 31, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC

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Rupert Grint and Johnny Depp in ‘Ebenezer’Credit: Jaap BuitendijkKey points -

Ti West says Johnny Depp’s Scrooge is “an unlikable guy” with “a certain sense of humor and charm” in Ebenezer.

The filmmaker says that Depp’s performance isn’t strongly connected to his other oddball characters like Edward Scissorhands: “It is its own thing.”

West also teases supporting turns from Tramell Tillman, Ian McKellen, and Rupert Grint.

Ti West is embracing the Christmas spirit.

Previously specializing in violent horror movies such as his recent Mia Goth collaborations X and Pearl, the filmmaker isn’t necessarily the first person you’d expect to adapt Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But West tells Entertainment Weekly he’s been “obsessed” with the holiday tale, first published in 1843, since his childhood, and he wanted to channel that love into a new adaptation, Ebenezer.

“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,” he says. “It was one of the earlier horror-adjacent things I had seen.”

West’s horror pedigree led him to emphasize the supernatural terror of the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. “I’ve always thought no one’s really made the movie version where the ghosts are a little bit spooky,” he explains.

Tramell Tillman and Johnny Depp in ‘Ebenezer’Credit: Jaap Buitendijk

Of course, the viability of every adaptation of Dickens’ story hinges on its lead actor. Enter Johnny Depp, a fellow Christmas Carol aficionado who loved the 1951 adaptation of the story starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge.

“He’s the movie, really,” West says. “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.”

West felt vindicated upon seeing the results of Depp’s performance, which marks his first turn in a major Hollywood release since his controversial 2022 defamation trial with ex-wife Amber Heard. “Having made the movie with him, I was right: The musicality is what is in the performance,” he says. “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.”

The filmmaker says Depp wasn’t afraid to lean into Scrooge’s unsavory side. “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 explains, noting how he and screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern wanted to complicate the characters’ morality.

“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,” he says. “We want to give Scrooge logic and a good argument, so when he is making an argument about something, he’s not wrong.”

West believes Depp brought that balance between grumpiness and sympathy. “As his Scrooge cuts someone down verbally or as he makes a financial point or withdraws, you do understand why he’s doing it,” he says. “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.”

To play the Ghost of Christmas Present, West cast Severance Emmy winner Tramell Tillman (above), who had previously acted in multiple regional productions of A Christmas Carol. “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,” he says. “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.”

West says Tillman’s character is somewhat impatient. “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,’” he says. “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.”

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Ian McKellen in ‘Ebenezer’Credit: Jaap Buitendijk

To portray Ebenezer’s deceased business partner, Jacob Marley, West employed Ian McKellen (above), who had never appeared in a production of A Christmas Carol despite 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,” West says. “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.”

Like Depp’s Scrooge, West characterizes McKellen’s Marley as a delightfully detestable figure. “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,” he says. “You do get a sense of that character’s pain in the movie when he comes to visit Scrooge.”

West also teases that Marley gets a moment in his corporeal form before becoming a ghost. “In this version, we have a scene with Marley alive,” he says.

Meanwhile, Rupert Grint plays Scrooge’s underpaid and overworked employee, Bob Cratchit. “He’s a core emotion in the movie, for sure,” West says. “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 adds, “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 isn’t trying to radically reimagine Dickens’ novella. “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,” he says. “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.”

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And although the first trailer for the film invoked Depp’s previous oddball characters, West clarifies that there’s not one easy comparison point for his turn as Scrooge. “It is its own thing,” he says. “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 continues, “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.”

West emphasizes that he wanted to strongly foreground the emotional undercurrent of the film, which makes the movie distinct from his previous work. “There’s some really genuine, heartfelt moments that are, for one reason or another, not in The Sacrament or X,” he explains. “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.”

Ebenezer hits theaters on Nov. 13.

on Entertainment Weekly

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