Aslan in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Photograph: Disney/Sportsphoto/Allstar View image in fullscreen Aslan in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Photograph: Disney/Sportsphoto/Allstar Week in geek Film Meryl Streep’s casting as Aslan has angered the Christian right. Don’t they have more pressing issues? Ben Child The Oscar-winner is voicing Narnia’s wise lion in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, leading to roars of fury from US evangelical commentators
I t is a confusing time to be alive, given how often these days Hollywood indulges in revisionism. Who knew that the Wicked Witch of the West was the heroine after all, that Cruella de Vil simply had a difficult childhood , or that Mufasa was adopted ? Now it turns out that Aslan, CS Lewis’s messiah with a mane, is a lioness – or at least, may sound like one in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, because Meryl Streep is providing the voice.
News that the Oscar-winner might be portraying Narnia’s Christ-like big cat first surfaced in April last year , prompting a flurry of complaints from conservative Christians. This week, the naysayers were back after Empire published a first look at the film , along with an interview with Gerwig in which the director confirmed the casting and explained her choice of actor. Streep, it turns out, was hired not because the Barbie director desperately fancied stoking the flames of controversy, but because she needed someone over 70 who could convey both wisdom and childlike wonder.
“I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness,” Gerwig said. She also explained she wanted one of the finest actors working today, adding: “That list is not a long one.”
View image in fullscreen The Magician’s Nephew director Greta Gerwig. Photograph: Presley Ann/Getty Images for Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Some American evangelical commentators have already made up their minds that this new version of Narnia comes from from the seventh circle of hell. Radio host Jenna Ellis accused Gerwig of “ profaning Christ with the divine feminine ”, while Texas preacher David Fairchild called the casting “ creative vandalism ”. The Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown said the decision to cast Streep was offensive because “CS Lewis literally intended Aslan to be the incarnation of Christ inside the world of Narnia”. She pointed to the end of Lewis’s novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in which Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund they will come to know him by another name in their own world. For Brown, casting Streep was a “deliberate mockery of Christianity”.
There has been no confirmation from Gerwig that this new Aslan is in fact female. And not everyone agrees that casting Streep is a problem: Christian writer Mary Pezzulo has pointed out the irony that some evangelicals think it’s perfectly all right for Jesus to be portrayed as an animal yet draw the line when he’s given a woman’s voice. “Very Online conservative Christians really think that portraying Christ as a lion, a carnivorous beast with notoriously smelly urine who sleeps 23 hours a day and steals meat from hyaenas, is beautiful sacred art,” she wrote. “But having Christ portrayed by a woman is sacrilege.”
However you view this one, it’s weird that a film adaptation of one of the least known books in the Narnia series now feels like the subject of an emergency reconvening of the Council of Nicaea . Also, Gerwig has said she pla…