Johnny Depp helped guide Andrea Riseborough around “Ebenezer ”set“ ”because she couldn’t see in her costume

Leigh BlickleySat, November 14, 2026 at 2:30 PM UTC

0

Johnny Depp as Ebenezer Scrooge and Andrea Riseborough as the Ghost of Christmas Past in ‘Ebenezer’Credit: Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount PicturesKey Points -

Andrea Riseborough said Johnny Depp guided her on the Ebenezer set.

She physically couldn’t see due to contacts she had to wear as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Ebenezer is in theaters now.

Andrea Riseborough could’ve been acting to anyone in Ebenezer, but she’s thankful her scene partner was Johnny Depp.

The actress breaks down a moment with Depp during a chat for Entertainment Weekly’s Around the Table video series, admitting the Ebenezer Scrooge actor helped her navigate the set while wearing blurry contacts. While shooting the scene where Riseborough’s Ghost of Christmas Present visits Scrooge in his bedroom, the actress stared off into the distance because she couldn’t see Depp in the character’s canopy bed.

“Do you remember we did that scene and I didn’t do it to you? I did it like [moves eyes away from Depp] here because I couldn’t see,” Riseborough recalls to EW as director Ti West and costars Tramell Tillman, Rupert Grint, and Sam Claflin laughed. “One of the first times we had a scene, I actually did it in the wrong direction. And you said [waving], ‘Over here!’”

“With the wig, me!” Depp playfully chimes in.

“We had full contacts, both Tramell and I,” Riseborough explains, noting Tillman’s character, the Ghost of Christmas Present. “And they had tiny little pin-hole points in them that you could see through, but I also had a veil on, and there were some curtains, and the bed rig was up, so [Depp] was being swallowed by a bed — there was a lot of stuff going on. And I just gave the entire scene to, I don’t know, Bob the grip!”

Riseborough says she saw “a tiny little wave in the peripheral vision” and thought, “Oh God, I hope that’s Johnny.”

It was, in fact, Depp.

“You were so kind to just direct me, though,” she tells the actor. “Sometimes he would just take me by the elbows and move me around, which was very helpful!”

Tillman also notes that he “couldn’t see” with his contacts in, with Depp quipping, “Couldn’t see a damn thing.”

Advertisement

Since the Severance star was visually unaware his famous costar was physically on set, he thought a stand-in had been pulling jokes. Turns out, Depp was actually pranking Tillman with a rubber fart machine.

Andrea Riseborough plays Ghost of Christmas Past in ‘Ebenezer’Credit: Paramount Pictures

Depp confesses during Around the Table: “I have this incredibly, just the most brilliant invention of all time, which is kind of a little rubber thing you put in your pocket, you squeeze on it, and it makes the perfect, involuntary [noise].”

“It’s a squeezy fart machine,” he continues. “I’m addicted to it. I’ve been doing it...I’ve been using it for years.”

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.

As for his portrayal of the classic literary humbug, director West praised Depp’s performance.

“He’s the movie, really,” West told EW in a prior interview. “The Dickensian dialogue has a certain musicality to it, and I just think Johnny has that cadence and that musicality to the way that he performs. And I thought, ‘I don’t know if he’d ever want to do it.’ And so we sent it over, and he also coincidentally happened to be obsessed with it his whole life.”

West continued, “He brings a different thing to it than anyone else has done. It’s uniquely him, but it’s also very reverent of the text.”

Ebenezer is now in theaters.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”