Christopher Plummer

Christmas has been around for hundreds of years, but our version of Christmas began with a very small novel, written by a probably average height man. Charles Dickens is credited with coming up with the very Christmas-ness of Christmas, that holiday spirit that drives people to light candles and gather family and drape pine branches and holly berries all over their furniture. With A Christmas Carol, Dickens revolutionized our portrayal of the holiday season, an evolution that will be dramatized by Dan Stevens and Dan Stevens’ wig in The Man Who Invented Christmas.

There are a number of interchangeable male actors who inexplicably seem to be dominating the Hollywood scene these days. Some have been more successful than others, some have stuck to indies or sci-fi blockbusters, and they all look like Sam Worthington. The latest upcoming World War II-set historical romance features the Sam Worthington who is Jai Courtney, star of Terminator: Salvation and Suicide Squad, who plays a Nazi officer who falls in love with a Dutch-born Jewish woman while he is investigating Kaiser Wilhelm.

Ahh, Christmas. Hollywood has made more movies about the Christmas spirit than about any other holiday, but it has yet to go back to the roots of the season to see why we celebrate it the way we do. No, I'm not talking Passion of the Christ here, I'm talking Charles Dickens. During the Industrial Revolution, Christmas as an institution had kind of fallen out of favor, due to growing modernism and mid-1800s Puritans, to whom any whiff of happiness is suspect. Enter Dickens, who rocked the world with A Christmas Carol, his tale of joy, family, and forgiveness that breathed new life into a deteriorating holiday. Now, Dan Stevens will take on the role of Dickens for The Man Who Invented Christmas, a film based around the six-week period during which he wrote the book.