When Charles Dickens published his classic novella A Christmas Carol, he introduced the world to one of literature’s most notorious antiheroes: Ebenezer Scrooge, a man whose name has become a synonym for greed and selfishness. Now acclaimed filmmaker Ti West has brought the miserly misanthrope back to the big screen in his most ambitious venture to date, Ebenezer, a moody supernatural tale that presents a hair-raising version of Victorian England’s favorite haunting that honors the slim volume’s original title: A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.
In a world full of brutal economic contrasts, a hard-hearted skinflint has his life turned inside-out by a trio of specters who force him to confront his misdeeds—past, present, and yet to come—and offer him one last chance at redemption. Set in a gritty 19th-century London gorgeously rendered by West’s world-class team of designers and craftspeople, Ebenezer is by turns frightening, poignant, funny, and hopeful as it showcases the filmmaker’s unique perspective without losing sight of the enduring appeal of the original.
In celebration of Ebenezer, our Entertainment Editor joined AAFCA’s roundtable with Tramell Tillman to learn more about his role as The Ghost of Christmas Present, being the first Black actor to portray the character in a major film adaptation, changes made to introducing the role to a new audience, learning from Johnny Depp, how the film impacted his definition of Christmas, and more.
As the Ghost of Christmas Present, Tramell Tillman takes Scrooge through the bustling streets of London to a family Christmas dinner at his employee Bob Cratchit’s house and a holiday party hosted by his nephew Fred to show him the joy of human connection. “I have had the good fortune of playing in three productions of A Christmas Carol in the United States. Ti brought an incredible eye for horror and drama to his film. I was intrigued by the idea of finding a new way to tell a classic tale by leaning into the ghost story of it all.”
“It’s always my desire to honor who I am and never forget where I came from. I can only bring myself to the work and nothing or nobody else. I wanted to honor my heritage. I wanted to honor my people, my community, in this way, in this story. We’re not going to forsake the fact this is played by an actor who’s Black; we’re not going to forsake the fact that if you put a Black man out in the wilderness, at least with me, you put me out in the wilderness; my hair is going to lock up. That’s just what’s going to happen. Having people that understood Black hair, who understood Black skin, and who understood a bit of our own history, which is in a weird way, made it feel alive. It felt organic, and it felt real. I do hope Black people will appreciate it and see it and honor it for what it is, and they feel seen as well.”
“One of Ti’s visions was that he wanted to lean into the ghost story of it all. I’ve done Christmas Carol on stage for years, and I tend to forget that it is a ghost story above all else. He isn’t alive, so when he pops up, it’s a big deal. Having a director who really wanted to lean into the spookiness of it or the supernatural was really exciting to me, and I’m always intrigued by having the opportunity to bring a different narrative to a story that we’ve heard countless times. I think it gives space for breath for us to learn something new and realize a different perspective.”
A quote from the original book provided the inspiration for his performance. “Marley says to Scrooge, ‘It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men and travel far and wide. If that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.’ That is Christmas Present’s lot. He is a holiday tour guide for the cheap and wayward, giving them the opportunity to do the things that they did not do in life.”
“It’s our job, our calling, to go out and make the world a better place. If we don’t do it in life, then we’re doomed in the afterlife to have our spirit roam basically in turmoil to witness what we could have shared and did not share in life. I thought maybe that’s Christmas Present’s story. He didn’t make the decision to redeem himself in enough time to avoid that fate. Now his job is to go around and tell other people, ‘Don’t make the same mistake I did.'”
Redemption and love lie at the heart of A Christmas Carol for Tillman. “I think the biggest lesson that Present shows to Scrooge is that he still has an opportunity to make the right choices. He is saying, ‘I’m only here to show you. The rest is up to you.’” Everything in this movie is specific and intentional, he says. “And that’s the mark of really great storytelling.”
“For me, it was really about creating a sense of awareness and having that sense of urgency. His time is very limited. And one of my favorite parts of Christmas Present is a conversation with Ebenezer where he says, ‘Listen, I don’t care if you get this or not. My welfare is not based on whether or not you learn this lesson because my purpose has been forfeited. He’s going to go and enjoy as much as he can the time he has, which is why he’s so ravenous, which is why he’s drinking, which is why he’s moving from place to place, which gives him the hope of what he did not have access to or which he did not choose to have access when he was alive in this iteration.”
“Instead, he pushed Ebenezer along and allowed him to see, ‘Listen, dude, you have access to this. I didn’t have it, and if I could go back, I would. But I can’t go after and get these things before it’s too late.’ I think having that hope and that warmth and also that roughness really creates an enjoyment to watch. It’s also an enjoyment to play. If I’m walking around the entire time, it just feels too heavy, and we already have someone on screen who’s carrying that weight. You don’t need me to feel it. But we can find a way to find present joy. And that’s a challenge I take on myself in my journals when I’m writing about my characters: ‘Where’s your character’s joy? Where do they find joy?’ I always try to find that and infuse it in the work in one way or the other.”
We are first introduced to Christmas Present as he sits at a feast of prepared food, eating like it’s his last time seeing food. It is loud, disgusting, and gluttonous but also an act of desperation. Food is one of the many pleasures he is denied in the afterlife, so when he’s back in amongst the living, his goal is to immediately indulge in his biggest pleasure. While the scene of Christmas Present eating a feast seems simple on the script, filming his gluttonous moment took planning and logic.
“We had to really figure out what was the strongest story to tell. There was a bivy of food that was right before me. It was my job to kind of figure out the choreography and to track if he was going to eat the orange first. Is he going to do the oysters? Is he going to eat this mashed sweet potato? I still have lines, so it can’t be anything that’s going to take too much time to eat or too much to eat at one time.”
“First, we had to figure out the cadence of the scene and what makes sense. Me discarding the orange and spitting it out of my mouth actually happened in the moment. That was a really fun addition to that. Johnny really loved it, and I really liked it as well. I cannot remember the number of takes, but there were a few takes. It was just really trying to find what makes sense in this story. That just speaks to the meticulousness of the storytellers in this, and I really wanted to make sure that it made sense, his rhythm, and his insatiable appetite.”
Tillman envisioned his character as a warrior and a hunter, regal in a massive animal fur coat with a green tunic underneath, all embellished in gold. The designers were happy to make that vision real. Included are some traditional references, and some Pagan elements are incorporated. They started by looking at the Alpine Krampus celebrations and their costumes and accessories. Then they looked at African elements that could tie into the warrior theme. Etchings in a West African alphabet that celebrate his fearlessness were added. His tunic is patchworked with fabrics in different shades of greens.
The look for the Ghost of Christmas Present was the largest undertaking for the team. Described by Dickens as a giant wearing a magnificent green robe and a crown of holly, he exists for only an hour as the present rapidly becomes the past. The design team indicates the passage of time through makeup and wardrobe that subtly deteriorates as his visitation to Scrooge winds down.
“Collaboration was key throughout this entire process. We couldn’t have accomplished this without constant conversation with each other, from the costume department, makeup, and hair, and, of course, with the direction. It was really imperative for us to figure out what the strongest story to tell is. Ti West had a vision of what he felt Christmas Present was, and it was very exciting to me. I wanted to expand his story and make it a little more organic; it’s in contrast to Christmas Past because her material is more synthetic. Whereas Christmas Present is animal fur, it’s leather, and it’s all of these materials or cloths or cotton and less manufactured products. ‘How do we find a way to allow those materials to inform his own history? That was able to expand. When we talk about his hair, this man is in the wilderness; he’s not getting a high fade. He doesn’t have a clean line. His hair is going to be a little dreaded, and then his hair kind of falls out a little bit or is graying.”
The costume is based on natural materials and has a handmade feeling, as if the ghost has made his clothing from foraged materials. There are leaves woven into his crown and throughout his coat that are actually thin pieces of silk that were individually crafted, hand painted, and sewn together.
The design team developed makeup prosthetics and costumes that begin to gradually degrade as time goes by. When we meet him, he’s a big, burly character with a full beard. At that point, it’s all Tramell, with a subtle prosthetic makeup that looks like very light facial scarring. As the evening goes on, he’s getting older. The prosthetic scars become more pronounced, and his skin begins to break down. His coat is like a living ecosystem that sheds as he ages.
“The physicality for the Christmas present was different from Seth Milchick or Captain Bledsoe. This was a man whose backstory was that of a man of the wilderness. He’s less reformed and refined, rougher and tougher. That allowed me to tap into another side of me I don’t often display, especially on film. I was really excited about that. [His voice] was a conversation with Ti West about finding his tambor and the concept of knowing he is a spirit that is very much present, and this is a Groundhog Day experience.”
“He’s in 1800s London, but maybe next Christmas he’s in Jamaica in 1975; his dialect will be a little bit different because he embodies what Christmas is in the town and in the year that he is there. We wanted to have a little bit of a London or British accent, but nothing that’s specific because he is from a different world. His hair really speaks to his heritage and where he’s from and what he represents. The clothing, the fur, really speaks to the organic material he acquires from being out in the wilderness. His height and his weight, the body—all of that informs his history that we don’t really get to tap into deeply in this story, which is fine because that’s not what’s the main focus. But I hoped that these choices would leave audiences wondering, ‘Where did he come from? What’s this guy’s story?'”
“I did really dive in to try to find out how Ghost of Christmas Present ended up as The Ghost of Christmas Present in this version. What choices did he make, or was he just conceived in this way that he’s just all of a sudden the Ghost of Christmas Present? I felt it was more interesting; there was no regret, and there was a little bitterness. There was a little bit of cantankerousness coming from him because he is now having to cart around these people and be a holiday tour guide for these people, so they get a chance he didn’t get to have.”
“We had to find a way to tell that story scene by scene because he’s aging rapidly. It was up to the hair team to really map out at what point we see him decay. That goes with the prosthetics before we see kind of this scarring, which also tells us this is a man of the wilderness; this is a warrior. But then we notice that the scarring kind of turns to vines, so he’s returning to the earth. He’s returning to organic matter, which was really exciting. I hope that resonates with the audience, and they’re taking it in.”
“I love the detail with the beard because his beard started to dread up a little bit, but then the dread kind of turned into twigs and sticks and leaves and whatnot. It was all of this specific detail we had, so we had so much fun really building together to tell this guy’s story.
In Ebenezer, the spirits who haunt Scrooge on this fateful Christmas Eve are truly dark and frightening. The world in which he lives can be grim and lonely. Perhaps the biggest departure from the original is that the director wanted to make a convincing case for Scrooge’s innate humanity. Still a penny-pinching Christmas cynic, he manages to evoke sympathy as he views snippets of his life pass before his eyes.
Everyone tag-teamed the development of the movie; screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern worked closely with West during the production, as well as Tillman and Deep. West’s decision to cast Johnny Depp in the leading role brings both humor and pathos to a character described by his creator as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! “Ti had such an amazing take on this film,” the actor says. “We were on the same page from the first second. We took some things a bit further than the book did, but man, every day I would open those pages to check for the feeling Dickens created in a scene or the exact dialogue. Every day, every scene. It was another great stretch of learning about the character and the story.”
“Johnny brings his own flavor to every role that he plays. He has a playfulness, a willingness to explore, and an appreciation of the language that just pops and elevates. And it pushes all of us to do the same.”
“After the first day working with Johnny, we just kind of clicked from one actor to another, and we just played on set. When you develop that level of trust and that level of play, you just open yourself up to a bit of improv. So, we did. There were things that we did, and we played off of each other that did not make the final cut, but we had a lot of fun. It’s just a testament to the environment that was on set. The level of play we have with each other and the love of the craft of what we do.”
“Also, the freedom to just exist and to relate to one another. You don’t want to be in a scene with someone who’s dead, like artistically dead. You want to be able to riff off of somebody. It’s like jazz; it’s music. It’s improv. It’s singing. You’re creating a composition together. You come with your skill set, and I come with my skill set, and we go out on the battleground, and we jam. That’s what we did because of the portrayal of this character. We’ve seen it in so many different lights, but we haven’t seen him Black. Stepping into this character and reimagining this character in this light. It feels very organic. It almost feels as if this was supposed to be.”
“I believe working on Ebenezer changes or deepens my perspective on the themes of Christmas. I don’t know how I could really give over to this story if I didn’t heed the lessons that are within this film. One of the biggest concepts addressed in this story is Ebenezer’s relationships, his relationships with his father, his sister, the love of his life, and his partner Jacob Marley, Mr. Fezywig, and how all of those relationships informed the decisions that he’s made.”
“Every time I read the script, every time I’m in scenes on set, I’m always thinking about going to call Mom, going to call your friend, and keeping fostering those relationships because it’s so important. I hope audiences will also find the importance of living in the moment and cherishing everything you have even in spite of the circumstances because life is tough, but also life is beautiful, and the beauty is there. It’s right before us if we’re open to seeing it. I hope that rings true for audiences who witness the film.”
To learn more about Tillman’s transformation check out the full roundtable in the video below. To learn more about Tillman’s revelation the brutal truth Behind the Ghost of Christmas Present, check out the video above.
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