'CHRISTMAS' GIFT
Stevens revels in look at Charles Dickens’ creative spirit
Last year, Dan Stevens mused, was a very busy year. He’s not kidding.
His latest movie, “The Man Who Invented Christmas” (opening Wednesday), has the “Downton Abbey” heartthrob as Charles Dickens, finding real-life inspiration to pen a comeback with one of the world’s most beloved novels, “A Christmas Carol.”
The film follows Stevens’ global smash as the Beast in “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” which the studio is hoping garners year-end awards consideration, and his hit FX series “Legion” as David Haller, a schizophrenic blessed with special powers.
Is there any connective tissue between the Beast, Dickens and David?
“There’s, I guess, a bit of me in there somewhere probably,” Stevens, 35, said. “I definitely hurtled from season 1 of ‘Legion’ in Vancouver to Dickens. It was literally a matter of days in-between those two.”
That seems appropriate since Stevens plays Dickens as an often manic whirlwind of energy as the writer strives to revive his career and creates soon-tobe such legendary characters as Tiny Tim, Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, all based on people Dickens knew.
“A lot of writers would claim to have voices in their heads,” Stevens said, but Dickens, the author of “A Tale of Two Cities,” “Great Expectations” and “David Copperfield,” literally did.
“There is an account of his daughter in her diaries writing that she went into the study discovering her dad making bizarre faces in the mirror with these extraordinary accents and voices of the characters.
“He was discovering the characters. Until he actualized them in his study, he couldn’t put them in his book. For a performer, it was fascinating.”
The movie shows how his characters, including Christopher Plummer as the inspiration for Scrooge, “surround him and are so annoying at times. This could have been a very dry cradle-to-grave biopic, which I’m never interested in,” Stevens added.
“But I was really, really charmed by the tone, by the humor and the film’s take on the creative process, really.
“To see what went into creating one of the most iconic pieces of literature that we have. And being a bit of a literary fanatic myself, I was very excited by the fresh tone of this kind of film.”