Netflix director Greta Gerwig has confirmed that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan the Lion in her upcoming reboot of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a casting choice that departs from Lewis’s original conception of the character as male.
Lewis wrote the Narnia stories as a Christian allegory, with Aslan intended as a direct stand-in for Jesus Christ. That framing made Aslan’s masculinity central to the character’s meaning within the books.
Speaking to Empire magazine, Gerwig explained her reasoning for choosing Streep.
“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,” Gerwig said. “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.”
Gerwig, who most recently directed the blockbuster Barbie, also released the first image of her reimagined Aslan. The design departs sharply from Lewis’s photorealistic lion, featuring multicolored eyes, a mix of feathers and fur, and red stripes across the face.
The result resembles a griffin more than a lion. Griffins are mythic hybrid creatures combining a lion and a bird of prey, with roots in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, and Greek mythology. The creature has no connection to Christian theology, and Lewis’s original Narnia books made no reference to such a hybrid figure.
The casting and design choices have drawn criticism from fans who see the changes as a departure from the Christian themes Lewis built into the source material.
