Meryl Streep has officially been cast as Aslan in Netflix’s upcoming THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW, and many are expressing their displeasure with the decision.
“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,” filmmaker Greta Gerwig told Empire of the casting.
She continued, “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. And also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one.”
Related: Netflix Casts Meryl Streep as Aslan? It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
However, not everyone shares Gerwig’s outlook. Lutheran commentator and podcaster Liam McCollum posted his thoughts on X, writing, “C.S. Lewis would’ve hated Gerwig’s deconstruction and subversion of Aslan.”
“You can guarantee Gerwig’s ‘Aslan’ will represent the present cultural milieu and Current Thing™️ and will be a secular message about gender equity or something,” McCollum added.
Texas Pastor L. David Fairchild also posted on X, saying Streep’s casting in THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW is “astonishingly arrogant.”
“Giving Aslan a female voice isn’t daring or profound or some brilliant act of creative genius. It’s an act of creative vandalism pretending to be artistic sophistication,” he wrote. “It’s more ideological slop produced by the machine that’s given us plenty already.”
Fairchild continued, “This garbage is what makes people distrust modern adaptations. She didn’t enter the author’s world with humility, she’s dragging the author’s world into hers in an attempt to update (code for correct) the author and story. Aslan isn’t accidentally male or thoughtlessly connect him with Christ, the incarnate SON of God, the Lion of Judah. Those choices were intentional and belong to the very architecture of Narnia. Geta doesn’t care. She knows better.
C.S. Lewis was been direct about Aslan being Jesus Christ within the books, writing to a mother who worried her son loved Aslan more than Jesus, “The things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before.”
With the news of this casting, it’s not surprising many NARNIA fans are upset that Gerwig’s adaptation isn’t taking Lewis’ source material for the direct Christian allegory that it is.
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