FX and BBC have revealed the first look at Steven Knight’s upcoming miniseries adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Although Tom Hardy was originally set to star in the production, but now he’s only going to executive produce. Guy Pearce will lead the adaptation as Ebenezer Scrooge. The rest of the cast includes:

Andy Serkis (Black Panther) as Ghost of Christmas Past; Stephen Graham (This Is England) as Jacob Marley; Charlotte Riley (Peaky Blinders) as Lottie; Joe Alwyn (The Favourite) as Bob Cratchit; Vinette Robinson (Doctor Who) as Mary Cratchit; Rutger Hauer (True Blood) as the Ghost of Christmas Future; Kayvan Novak (What We Do In The Shadows) as Ali Baba and Lenny Rush (Old Boys) as Tim Cratchit.

There are no details in the press release about this three-part adaptation other than it’s “a haunting, hallucinatory, spine-tingling immersion into Scrooge’s dark night of the soul,” but Knight told us earlier this year that he plans to make his Dickens adaptations--of which A Christmas Carol is the first--in a modern context:

“What I’m planning to do is adapt five Dickens books—A Christmas Carol plus four novels—and do it over a period of six or seven years and have a repertory of actors, and I think we’ll get the best actors in the world, hopefully, to take part because the Dickens characters are so great. And just do like [David] Copperfield and Oliver Twist and Great Expectations and do them in a modern way. Not really in a Taboo way, but sort of like that.”

I’m always up for a new and exciting twist on A Christmas Carol, and a three-part story sounds ideal. Nick Murphy (who did the underrated ghost story The Awakening) is set to direct the adaptation.

A Christmas Carol premieres this December.

a-christmas-carol-guy-pearce
Image via FX