Eight Grinches, One Ranking: Walton Goggins and Pete Davidson

By Marcus Bennett

On Dec. 18, 1966, the Grinch made his televised debut in the animated CBS special How the Grinch Stole Christmas, as Sarah Bahr recounts. The green grump came down the side of a mountain into Whoville, swiped every present in town and tried to cancel Christmas. His plan failed because friends and family remained at the heart of the holiday.

The Times culture and style writer Bahr marks the special’s 60th anniversary by ranking eight performers who played Dr. Seuss’s humbug. Her scale runs from merely mean or even merry to downright demonic. The exercise asks which performance makes the character’s cruelty most convincing.

Bahr says the long-fingered menace won a national audience. That reach led to six decades of animated and live-action films, a musical and other work. In her account, the recurring appeal comes from a simple reversal: a green antagonist attacks Christmas, but the community’s attachments defeat his plan. The anniversary ranking tests that pattern through performance rather than plot.

The demonic mark

Bahr gives two of the eight entries the 😈 rating. Walton Goggins carries it in the ranking’s 2025 entry for a Walmart holiday advertisement. Pete Davidson carries it for a 2020 Saturday Night Live sketch. Bahr’s prose gives both performances more nuance than the shared emoji, locating the joke in the Grinch’s degree of harm.

Walton Goggins

In the ranking’s 2025 entry, Bahr says Walton Goggins donned green fur for Walmart’s holiday ad campaign the previous year but left his menacing face behind. Cindy Lou asks for his help sharing Black Friday deals with the people of WhoKnewVille and tells him, “You could be the hero.” He then springs into action.

Although he remains prickly throughout, Bahr says, the time it takes him to move from light name-calling to full-on do-gooder is a paltry 10 seconds. The reversal defines the performance. Goggins begins as a grumbling obstacle, then becomes an active partner in the sales pitch. His green menace does not dictate the scene; it pivots toward helping Cindy Lou. The quick change supplies the advertisement’s central joke and undercuts the demonic rating with a figure who cannot sustain hostility for more than 10 seconds.

Pete Davidson

Pete Davidson’s Grinch belongs to Saturday Night Live in 2020. Bahr calls the character horny and describes Davidson in a bathrobe and tight white underwear over green fur. He comes downstairs on the morning after a threesome with Cindy Lou’s parents, played by Mikey Day and Kristen Wiig. The sketch revisits the previous evening’s climactic cries.

Chloe Fineman plays an innocent Cindy Lou. She tells her mother that she woke him up: “You kept screaming, ‘You’re a mean one! You’re a mean one!’” Bahr calls the result more a cuddle dud than a mischief-maker. The quotation carries the Grinch’s defining phrase, but here it reports sexual excess instead of Christmas sabotage. The threat is comic and sexual, not a sustained campaign against the town.

The two portrayals test different limits of the character. Goggins turns the Grinch into a retail helper whose transformation takes 10 seconds. Davidson makes him a bathrobed figure of sexual embarrassment, quoting the original warning after a threesome. One performance depends on speed and reversal; the other depends on sexual incongruity. Both preserve the green fur and enough appetite or irritation to justify Bahr’s severe emoji.

The wider ranking promises a single meanest Grinch among the eight. The two entries detailed here share the 😈 mark, so their proximity shows how the scale can hold different kinds of outrageousness together. Retail rudeness and sexual excess look equally extreme in the ratings, yet they produce very different characters.

What does the 60th anniversary change for audiences?

It restores the 1966 CBS special as the reference point for every later portrayal. The test is not whether an actor can wear green fur or deliver the special’s signature insult. It is whether the performer can make the character dangerous enough, then reveal an appetite for company, deals or pleasure that redirects that danger.

As the anniversary approaches, any future portrayal must clear that benchmark. The performer must preserve menace long enough for the audience to believe it, then earn the turn toward generosity or pleasure, or let embarrassment redirect the threat. That is the standard Bahr’s demonic emoji leaves unresolved.