Director Greta Gerwig shared that actress Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in her upcoming film Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. Aslan is a lion representing Christ in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series.
Discussing the gender switch for the character, Gerwig told Empire, “I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness. Someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight.”
“I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child,” she said. “And also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one.”
The outlet detailed Gerwig’s Aslan as having “heterochromic eyes and bold red-striped visage nods to one of her key creative inspirations: David Bowie.”
Lewis always intended Aslan to represent God, as he explained in 1961:
The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself ‘Supposing there really were a world like Narnia, and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong, and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?’ The stories are my answer. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as He became a Man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) the lion is supposed to be the King of beasts; (b) Christ is called ‘The Lion of Judah’ in the Bible; (c) I’d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the books.
