Guy Pearce, Steven Knight on A Christmas Carol, BBC and FX’s new take on the festive classic
- Pearce plays Scrooge in Steven Knight’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which also features Andy Serkis, Stephen Graham and Joe Alwyn
- The three-hour special is a period piece with a difference, with Pearce saying the formality of the period is not allowed to obstruct the actors’ personalities
Bah! Humbug! It’s that time of year again, and American TV channel FX and British broadcaster the BBC are jointly celebrating Scrooge’s famous epithets with a three-hour special, A Christmas Carol.
But make no mistake. This is not your father’s Christmas Carol, with its wizened Ebenezer Scrooge stalked by a phalanx of ephemeral ghosts.
They’re all there. But Scrooge is played by 52-year-old Aussie Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential). And the script is adapted by the innovative British screenwriter Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders, Locke).
“What I wanted to do was to not set out to deliberately vandalise what the story is,” Knight says. “I know how precious it is to a lot of people. It’s precious to me as well, and it’s part of our narrative; it’s part of our culture. It’s part of Christmas.
“What I wanted to do is to deepen it and give it maybe a resonance that people now will go back to the book and read it again. I never try to introduce alien ideas, modern ideas, contemporary ideas into the narrative, but rather dig into what’s there and find out some of the things that a contemporary audience would be interested in.”