A beloved universe roared into existence in New York City on October 13 as Greta Gerwig debuted a first look at the trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. Ahead of its online release, Gerwig enthusiastically shared footage from her film at AMC Lincoln Square’s IMAX, one of the biggest screens in America, during a press screening of the first trailer.
Former Late Show host and lifelong fantasy fiction enthusiast Stephen Colbert moderated; when Gerwig thanked Colbert for hosting, Colbert quipped that he was happy to do it because “I don’t have a job anymore.” Gerwig described C.S. Lewis’s beloved Chronicles of Narnia novels as a foundational childhood text, saying it “created” her when she was a young reader.
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During her research, she read all of Lewis’s writing, from Narnia to his philosophical and spiritual works. She traveled to sites from the writer’s life, from Belfast to Oxford to Cambridge. Lewis was from Belfast, as is Gerwig’s young leading actor, newcomer David McKenna (starring as the titular character), which she found to be a connection between author and actor.
Greta Gerwig discusses how she got involved in creating Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.
Knowing Gerwig is a lifelong Narnia fan, Colbert asked how she first got involved in the project. After Netflix acquired the rights to the series, Gerwig met Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos at a party for her partner Noah Baumbach’s film Marriage Story, also a Netflix release.
After “twenty minutes” of passionately describing her love of the series and why Netflix ought to begin with The Magician’s Nephew, Sarandos offered Gerwig a chance to write the screenplay. Her directorial involvement came after this, but before Gerwig’s involvement with Barbie, her biggest project so far.
After screening the first trailer and a featurette on the film’s craftspeople and artists, Gerwig discussed the friendship between David McKenna and Beatrice Campbell, the newcomers playing Digory and Polly, the film’s protagonists. “They found each other in every room,” Gerwig said of the audition process, which involved meeting as many as “thirty kids” at a time during in-person auditions. (Including self-tapes, Gerwig estimated she had seen “thousands” of children for the two roles.)
Watch the trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.
Discussions on casting mostly centered on the children, but Gerwig noted that Daniel Craig, as Digory’s Uncle Andrew (the magician of The Magician’s Nephew himself), told the children, trying to put them at ease, that he was nervous ahead of rehearsal. Quoting her young leads, Gerwig said the children told Craig, “‘Greta’s nice, you’ll be fine.'”
Narnia’s most beloved character, Aslan the lion, is voiced by “an up-and-coming young actress,” Colbert joked, “Meryl Streep.” Streep’s casting has been controversial among Narnia fans as Aslan is male, but Gerwig kept the focus on praising McKenna and Campbell. Also under wraps, save for a glimpse in trailer footage and a few stills, is Emma Mackey’s White Witch.
Gerwig’s hourlong presentation included a discussion on her “heart-forward” approach to the story and to hiring artists who were willing to take risks to fulfill the mighty task of visualizing Narnia’s origin story. Gerwig noted that many blockbuster films are about destruction, but Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, is a “creation story,” where Narnia is breathed into life through song.
Taking a heart-forward approach.
Gerwig hired her former Barbie collaborators Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt to develop Narnia’s rock-inspired sound. She obtained special permission to use Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which has never been licensed for film before, after screening a cut of the film for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. “They have a reverence for [Lewis’s] work,” Gerwig beamed, believing the song’s narrative structure to parallel themes of creation and idolatry in Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew.
As with hiring Streep to voice Aslan, Gerwig also did not discuss changing the book’s setting. Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is set in the 1940s despite the book taking place in 1900; the series’ most famous novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe features an adult Digory taking in child evacuees from WWII.
This raises questions about Gerwig’s plans for future Narnia installments. Still, given her thoughtful rearrangement of events for her own Little Women (2019) adaptation, it seems to be a deliberate, if mysterious, choice. (Lewis’s stepsons issued a statement supporting Gerwig’s film, calling her passion for Narnia “sincere” and expressing a desire to “continue working with [Narnia‘s production team] on future projects.”)
A peek into the vast world of C.S. Lewis.
It was a thrilling insight into Netflix’s largest-scale feature film; Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is Netflix’s first film to receive a wide theatrical release. The trailer, released shortly after Gerwig’s IMAX presentation, details Digory and Polly’s adventures from London into Charn, the fantastical world predating Narnia, and awakening Mackey’s villainous Jadis, later known as the White Witch.
Additional footage shows Craig’s Uncle Andrew, magic arriving in London, and the Wood Between the Worlds, a realm with portals to different worlds. The trailer ends with the thrilling arrival of Aslan, materializing from transparent stars into a corporeal lion.
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew arrives in theaters February 12, 2027.
