Charles Dickens has been portrayed on screen a few times – Simon Callow gives good Dickens, for example – but now Dan Stevens is going to give it a shot, playing a younger take on the man alongside Christopher Plummer and Jonathan Pryce in The Man Who Invented Christmas.
Bharat Nalluri is aboard to direct, with Susan Coyne adapting Les Stanford's book. The tome, which hit shelves in 2008, finds Dickens bereft and broke in 1843, his last three books having failed to set the literary world alight. Dumped by his publishers, he decides to self-publish a book to earn money for his family, and spends six frantic weeks writing a little title called A Christmas Carol. Thus, an everlasting idealised image of the festive season was born. And Tiny Tim, who did not die... Hold on, we're letting the fact that Christmas is getting close affect our minds.
Plummer will be a version of the story's most famous character, Scrooge, while Pryce is set to play a beatific holy man who imprisons Dickens when he refuses to swear truly loyalty to old gods and is eventually blow... Nope, he's just playing Dickens Sr.
The cameras should be rolling in December and we predict the film will be out in the blazing summer sun next year... Or perhaps, just perhaps, it'll be released on Christmas Day. The Spirit Animal did it all in one night. He can do anything! He... STOP THAT. It's not time yet, and this is conflating an Empire in-joke with a classic piece of literature.