“I really felt like that was how the Grinch would dance”
Dr Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas has been adapted many times.
There is the classic animated TV special, voiced by Boris Karloff. And then there’s the live-action version with Jim Carrey, in full-body green make-up. Then in 2018, there was a CGI take, with Benedict Cumberbatch.
We are getting another version this year – a musical version. Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Musical will air December 9th on NBC in America.
With a musical version, you would expect this to be maybe the friendliest take on the character yet, right? Well, possibly not. According to Matthew Morrison, who takes the lead role, his Grinch is taking inspiration from one of the nastiest characters in recent movie history: Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
“I didn’t want the Grinch to be a good dancer,” he told EW. “I took a lot from Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Joker, just going down those steps, like loose and [revelling in] abandon and just carefree and raw. I really felt like that was how the Grinch would dance. At first, I was like ‘I don’t think the Grinch dances’; it didn’t feel very Grinch-y, but then I came up with that and it felt right.”
Morrison did not go on to elaborate if his version of the Grinch will murder people on the subway, or incite a riot in Gotham City, or kill a talkshow host live on TV. We would guess not, but you never know. We are always up for a timely update of the classics.
Matthew Morrison is best known for playing Mr Shue in Glee. The Grinch musical ran on Broadway in 2006 and 2007, and also toured the UK in 2019.
The Jim Carrey version was recently declared officially the most Christmassy movie in the history of cinema, in a new study that calculated the number of festive references in popular Xmas films.
