Greta Gerwig walked onto a New York stage beside Stephen Colbert to talk about a lion, a lamp-post world and her own faith. The occasion was an IMAX preview event ahead of the first trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, her Netflix take on C.S. Lewis, and the questions kept circling back to belief.
Faith in the director’s chair
Gerwig was raised a Unitarian Universalist and attended Protestant churches. She also went to a Catholic girls’ high school in Sacramento, which fed into her 2017 film Lady Bird. Religious themes or settings turn up in much of her other work as well. “Faith has been a thread through all of my work,” she told Colbert. “For me, film and faith have always gone hand in hand.”
She came to Lewis as a young reader of the Narnia books, and she says his memoir showed her how much of his own life ran through them. His mother died of cancer when he was a boy, and the mother of Digory Kirke, the hero of The Magician’s Nephew, is gravely ill too. While writing the script she read everything Lewis wrote and visited Oxford and Cambridge, where he taught, “to align myself with where Lewis’ soul was.”
The book is sixth in publication order but works as a prequel, telling how Narnia was made. It has never been filmed before.
From indie darling to franchise builder
The jump to a studio-scale fantasy follows an unusual run. Gerwig earned Oscar nominations for best director and original screenplay with Lady Bird, a best adapted screenplay nomination for Little Women, and a second adapted screenplay nomination for Barbie, which she co-wrote with her husband, Noah Baumbach. All three films were nominated for best picture. Barbie became the first film with a solo female director credit to gross more than $1 billion worldwide.
The New Yorker reported in July 2023 that Netflix had hired her to write and direct two Narnia films. Her agent said at the time that she was looking to move beyond the small-scale dramas she was known for.
In the new film, Digory (David McKenna) and Polly (Beatrice Campbell) poke around the office of Digory’s Uncle Andrew (Daniel Craig) and tumble into a magical wood full of pools that lead to other worlds. One takes them to a dead city, where they wake its queen (Emma Mackey), who wiped out her own people. She ends up loose in London.
A Led Zeppelin first
The trailer is set to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” a song the band had never allowed in a film. Gerwig said she met Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and walked them through the movie. “They saw the heart of the story,” she said, adding that they love Lewis and revere his work. Earlier requests had failed, including a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, Almost Famous in 2000 and last year’s Stranger Things finale.
Gerwig told Colbert the song fits the story “exactly.” In her words, it is about a spiritual journey, with a true path of enlightenment on one side and false idols and wrong turns on the other.
The Aslan debate
Casting has drawn the loudest argument. Meryl Streep will voice Aslan, the lion who creates Narnia and serves as an allegory for Jesus Christ. Some objectors say a Christlike figure should not be voiced by a woman, and radio host Seth Udinsky wrote in The Christian Post that the choice was an attack on Christian faith. Catholic writer Mary Pezzulo took the other side. If Christians accept Jesus portrayed as a lion, she asked, why the fury over a woman’s voice?
Gerwig did not address Aslan’s gender directly when defending the choice. She told Empire she wanted someone profound but not pretentious, with gravitas but not “morose self-seriousness,” and older than 70. The lion in the trailer looks male, with a large mane, and Gerwig called Aslan “he” throughout her talk with Colbert. Lewis’ family and the C.S. Lewis Company have backed the project.
The trailer drew 34 million YouTube views in two days. Some fans compared its electric visuals to a Marvel film, and NarniaWeb’s review called the rest of it generic fantasy after a promising start. Others said they recognized scenes and lines straight from the book. The film opens in IMAX theaters on February 12, 2027, with its Netflix debut set for April 2.
Sources
- Greta Gerwig
- New ‘Narnia’ director reflects on faith while unveiling first trailer
- Greta Gerwig On Securing Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" For 'Narnia'
Photo: Martin Kraft (CC BY-SA 3.0)
