(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros / YouTube Still)
Thu 25 December 2025 16:15, UK
There aren’t many things Jack Nicholson didn’t manage to accomplish before he retired from acting, but the three-time Academy Award winner never starred in a movie that gets rewatched every Christmas.
That’s not why people get into the business, but it’s a badge of honour that countless performers have worn, and continue to wear, with pride. He’s been in a few films that feature festive iconography, but he never got his It’s a Wonderful Life, Scrooged, Bad Santa, or any other Yuletide star vehicle that becomes must-see as soon as the tinsel comes out and the tree goes up.
Nicholson wouldn’t have lost much sleep over it, but he did have a chance. It was short-lived, but since the project’s inception, his name resided at the very top of the wish list. After her husband died in 1991, Audrey Geisel assumed control over the Dr Seuss back catalogue, and she was fairly resistant to Hollywood.
He was equally protective over his work, with only a handful of animated shorts featuring his characters being made from the 1940s onward. There had never been a feature-length adaptation of a Seuss story before, never mind in live-action, but Ron Howard and Brian Grazer decided to try their luck anyway.
If How the Grinch Stole Christmas was to happen, they needed to get Geisel’s approval, or it was dead in the water. It was a daunting prospect, especially when the Imagine Entertainment duo were hoping to change the habit of a lifetime by bringing Seuss to the silver screen, never mind that she had her own designs on casting.
“Audrey said, ‘I really want Jack Nicholson to play the Grinch,’” Grazer recalled to Vulture. That could have been a potentially massive hurdle to clear, because if the two parties couldn’t get on the same page, there wouldn’t be a movie to make at all. If she vetoed other candidates, the whole thing would have fallen apart, and Geisel was dead set on recruiting Nicholson for the title role.
“I said, ‘Jack Nicholson is amazing, but I don’t think he has the qualities we’re looking for,’” Grazer replied. “The Grinch is crabby and mean, and you have to forgive him for being crabby and mean. He has to have a lot of innocence’. And she said, ‘Who would you want?’ I said, ‘The only person I would do it with is Jim Carrey, no other actor.’”
One major issue was that the producer hadn’t actually talked to Carrey about the film. Fortunately, they were working together on Liar Liar at the time. The actor “very much wanted” to play John Nash in Grazer’s next production, A Beautiful Mind, but he was “already pursuing Russell Crowe, and I didn’t want to tell him.” A compromise was eventually reached, and he agreed to go green.
Could Jack Nicholson have headlined How the Grinch Stole Christmas? Absolutely, and it may well have been incredible. Would he have done it? Carrey got $20 million, so maybe, but the makeup and prosthetics might have been a deal breaker. Had Geisel not acquiesced to Grazer’s request, he’d have been obligated to approach her first choice, and it would have been a sight to see had he agreed.
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