Guy Pearce’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ gives tale a bleak spin

| Thursday, Dec. 19, 7:30 p.m., FX

Film versions of “A Christmas Carol” abound during the holiday season, with anyone from Albert Finney and George C. Scott to Alastair Sim and Patrick Stewart playing the plum role Ebenezer Scrooge. Charles Dickens’ miser is most often seen — and played — as a grizzled Victorian sourpuss, complete with mutton chops and a nightshirt for those haunted sleep scenes. When adapting the novel for a new version that debuts Thursday, Dec. 19, on FX, executive producer Steven Knight had a different Scrooge in mind — someone who didn’t wear his soul on his sleeve. “Because,” as Knight told a panel of journalists from the Television Critics Association, “his soul is pretty wretched.”

In the end, Knight cast British actor Guy Pearce, whose films “Memento” and “LA Confidential” are iconic, and whose performance in the 2011 HBO miniseries “Mildred Pierce” won him a Best Supporting Actor Emmy award. Against a fraught background, Knight and his cast, which includes Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit and “The Lord of the Rings” actor Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past, tell a story we all think we know, with a more pitiless focus. This Scrooge burns Christmas trees and tells Jacob Marley (Stephen Graham), “It is the place where Christmas comes to die.” Scrooge’s tale of hard-won redemption after a life of greed seems more relevant than ever.

Knight, 60, whose TV career includes the streaming series “Peaky Blinders,” spoke about his hopes for the new take on a revered classic.

When Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, he was protesting the treatment of the poor. What elements did you want to add when you wrote your adaptation?

What I wanted to do was to follow the sentiment and the feeling and the emotion of the original and maybe explore some of the themes, even though it’s still set in the same period, that Dickens himself at the time, as a writer, was maybe not allowed to explore. So we’ve gone a little deeper into some of the issues that are involved. But the most important thing about [the show] is it’s about the characters and it’s about their relationships and it’s about what Christmas means.

Guy Pearce seems young to play Scrooge. He’s only 52. What was your thinking about going with a younger actor?

I wanted to make Ebenezer Scrooge someone who, if it weren’t for what he is and how he behaves, would be an attractive person, would be an attractive man. What I wanted to do is have an audience say, “Why is this person like this?” I think “Why is someone like this?” isn’t a question that necessarily was asked by a Victorian audience, a Victorian people who were reading novels. It wasn’t necessarily something that readers asked about central characters. You were given a character. That’s who they were and that’s how they behaved and then there is redemption or not redemption. I hope that in the three hours, we explore the reasons behind what Ebenezer Scrooge is. Why did he become this person?

Do you think the story reflects modern class conflicts?

I didn’t want to make this overtly political at all. What I wanted to do was to make it about the characters that Dickens created and about the world they were in, but it seemed to me that, inevitably, you get the resonance of things that are happening today. And when you see the relationship between Scrooge and Bob Cratchit, what’s entertaining for me in the way Dickens does it is there is what you would call an oppression, and there’s exploitation, but there’s also Bob Cratchit getting his own — there’s Bob Cratchit being funny. There’s Bob Cratchit doing his thing. And that’s why, as I say about Dickens, he doesn’t deal in stereotypes of character or the stereotypes of the issue. So it’s never a question of poor exploited workingman, terrible exploitative ruling class. There’s always nuance. The politics is in there, but it’s so much more about the characters. It’s about the people who are involved. And, hopefully, a contemporary audience will see those characters and recognize them as their boss or their employee, you know. Nothing changes, and that’s what I hope comes across in this.

Victorian London was not a great place to be alive, even if you had money. Squalor and illness were rampant. How true to the time period is this adaptation?

It was a very physically dangerous time. There was a lot of illness, a lot of death. But what was great about Dickens was that he was confronting his readers with the truth about the city that they lived in, you know. And this really is a London story. But I think that what one hopes to achieve is to get even close to what Dickens achieved; which is to take that squalor, take that suffering and take those realities, but also have that sort of joy. There is almost like a joy about everything that Dickens writes in terms of how he enjoys the characters that he’s writing. Even Scrooge, even at his worst, there is sort of an ability of Dickens to make that character appeal to you and you know that character and you feel that character.