Scrooge
John Leguizamo
Scrooge is the leader of the team of mercenaries who break into the Lightstone family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone hostage. He’s cunning and scrappy and is forced to face off against a surprise opponent: Santa Claus. “In the beginning, Scrooge is so cocky and in control,” Tommy Wirkola says. “He’s planned this for so long, but he didn’t plan for Santa showing up at the same time. So, we see him slowly but surely losing more and more control and becoming more and more unleashed.”
The 87North filmmakers suggested Emmy Award winner John Leguizamo for the role after having worked with him on John Wick. “He was our first choice as our main villain,” Kelly McCormick says.
Wirkola had long been a fan of Leguizamo’s work. “Throughout the years, we’ve seen him in so many varied roles in many different films,” Wirkola says. “He’s done so much great work, including a couple of legendary bad guys. And we felt that with this role, he got a chance to pull on some of that and be scary, violent and the leader of this bad group, while at the same time, he got to be charismatic and fun. John’s also a great writer and
Violent Night – Production Information
9
added a lot of funny lines and adlibs for Scrooge. Scrooge has a couple moments in the film where he shows true emotion and we can see him breaking when it comes to Christmas, and I thought that elevated the character.”
The tell-tale sign for Leguizamo that a script is good is if he’s racing through it. “Violent Night was a page turner, and I was laughing out loud,” Leguizamo says. “I was intrigued and moved by it in so many ways. There was magic in that script. Villains are tricky because you don’t want to overdo it, but you also don’t want to undercook it either. Scrooge was really well written and intelligent, and an action flick is only as good as how intelligent your villain is. If your villain’s a moron, the movie is moronic. So, we made sure that Scrooge was an intelligent, albeit disgruntled, guy.”
Leguizamo and Harbour worked extensively with the 87 North team to get the battle between Scrooge and Santa just right. “Action films look great when they’re done, but they’re hard to make,” Leguizamo says. “They take a lot of hours of prep and a lot of takes. We had great stunt coordinators who really took the time to train us properly. David’s a much bigger guy than me, so we talked about how we could make it believable that a guy my height—5’ 8”, maybe 5’ 9” on my Wikipedia page—could beat up this big-ass dude. We decided that Scrooge is slicker and moves quicker. He’s much more strategic, while Santa is brawnier. I had two major fights that I practiced for about a month. The first fight was about 10 moves, and the big fight was over 50 moves, which is a massive amount to memorize and execute. And doing it for 12 hours straight is rough on your body! I could barely get out of bed.”
