Greta Gerwig has confirmed that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan, the lion at the centre of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, in her $280 million Netflix adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, according to The Telegraph. The casting, revealed in an Empire magazine cover story, ends more than a year of speculation and has become one of the most discussed decisions in the run-up to the film’s February 2027 theatrical release, as reported by Deadline.
Gerwig told Empire that she wanted an actor with ‘gravitas but not morose self-seriousness’ who could be ‘profound but not pretentious,’ and said she specifically sought someone over 70 who retained ‘the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child,’ according to quotes carried by both Deadline and Philstar. She added that ‘that list is not a long one,’ explaining her choice of Streep, whom she previously directed in Little Women.
Design choices draw scrutiny alongside casting
Alongside the casting news, Gerwig revealed that Aslan’s visual design draws on David Bowie, giving the lion heterochromic eyes and a striped, multicoloured coat, and that the film’s tone is inspired by 1960s and 1970s rock musicians including Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page, according to What’s on Netflix. Gerwig also confirmed she has moved the story’s setting from Lewis’s original Edwardian period to the Cold War era, according to The Telegraph.
The Telegraph reported that the decision to cast a woman as Aslan, a character widely understood by literary scholars to represent an incarnation of Christ within Lewis’s explicitly Christian allegory, has triggered criticism from evangelical Christians in the United States. Texas preacher L. David Fairchild told the paper that ‘giving Aslan a female voice isn’t daring or profound or some brilliant act of creative genius, it’s an act of creative vandalism,’ as quoted by The Telegraph. Other commentators, including Liam McCollum, have separately raised similar objections in wider social media discussion of the casting, though Gerwig herself has not addressed the theological criticism directly in the interviews published so far.
Trade press treats casting as creative triumph
Entertainment trade outlets have largely framed the casting differently. Deadline and Philstar both centred their coverage on Gerwig’s own explanation of why Streep was, in her words, essentially the only choice, treating the decision as an extension of her established directorial vision rather than as a departure from the source material’s theology. Neither outlet’s initial reporting mentioned the religious objections that The Telegraph made central to its story.
How the outlets framed it
The Telegraph’s report leads with the accusation that the film is ‘profaning Christ,’ quoting evangelical preacher L. David Fairchild’s description of the casting as ‘creative vandalism’ and treating the theological objection as the news itself. By contrast, Deadline and Philstar frame the same casting announcement as an exciting creative reveal, foregrounding Gerwig’s rationale about wanting an actor over 70 with ‘gravitas’ and burying or omitting the religious backlash entirely. The difference shows how the same factual event, a director’s casting explanation given to Empire magazine, can be presented either as a story about artistic vision or as a story about cultural offence, depending on which framing an outlet chooses to lead with.
Both framings rest on the same underlying facts: Gerwig’s quoted rationale, Streep’s attachment to the role since April, and the film’s scheduled IMAX release on 12 February 2027 ahead of its Netflix streaming debut on 2 April 2027. What differs is which audience each outlet assumes cares more, fans anticipating Gerwig’s next creative swing, or readers concerned that a text long read as Christian allegory is being reshaped without its original theological signals intact.
