Rupert Grint Says Johnny Depp Delivers an Amazing A Christmas Carol Performance
Depp goes full Scrooge as Ebenezer, with Grint as steadfast clerk Bob Cratchit.
Johnny Depp is back in holiday mode, but not the cozy kind. He is playing Scrooge for Ti West in Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, and early, very not-official set pics make him look almost unrecognizable. The cast is stacked, Rupert Grint is unusually animated about it, and yes, there is a certain poetic weirdness to a former Fantastic Beasts star working alongside a former Potter kid.
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol
Grint, who is playing Bob Cratchit, says the production is hitting that tricky sweet spot: classic story, new pulse. He put it this way:
It’s going great. It’s obviously a story that everyone knows, and there’ve been lots of adaptations in the past, and this just feels very different. It feels very faithful, but it has Ti’s signature on it, and Johnny’s amazing. He’s doing some really interesting things.
- Johnny Depp as Ebenezer Scrooge
- Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit
- Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley
- Daisy Ridley
- Sam Claflin
- Tramell Tillman
- Andrea Riseborough
Grint also sounds a little starstruck about sharing a set with McKellen, which, fair:
He’s just iconic.
For Depp, this feels like a genuine swing at a comeback. After a run of box office face-plants and that extremely public defamation trial, his career basically stalled out. He was removed from the Fantastic Beasts series after two films, and Mads Mikkelsen took over as Grindelwald in the third (and ultimately final) movie, The Secrets of Dumbledore. Now he is leading a prestige-leaning Dickens adaptation from a filmmaker with a sharp point of view. Timing matters, and so does the company he is keeping here.
Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol opens in theaters on November 13, 2026.
Meanwhile, Rupert Grint went full folk-horror with Nightborn
If you want something decidedly less festive, Grint just premiered Nightborn at the Berlin International Film Festival. Directed by Hanna Bergholm, it follows a couple who move to a cottage deep in the Finnish forest where wife Saga (Seidi Haarla) spent much of her childhood. Joy turns to dread when their baby arrives... different. Their marriage buckles, reality frays, and things get progressively gnarly. Grint plays the husband, Jon.
The hook that got him on board: puppets. As in, the film uses a practical puppet to portray the couple’s unsettling child, with multiple builds as the baby grows and, yes, metamorphoses. Grint’s enthusiasm for the analog craft is very real:
I love her use of puppets. Whenever I can be on set with a puppet, it’s quite fun... I worked with a few on Potter. They’re something you don’t really see that often in films anymore — filmmakers are very quick to use CGI, but it’s so nice to have a physical thing.
This is not Grint’s first brush with creepy infants — Servant fans, you know. Nightborn does not have a wide release date yet, but the Berlin bow should help it find one.