@fantasia

So would that mean that Frank and Hellen bring a child into Narnia? That’s an intriguing possibility that I would not be against.

I thought Digory’s dad is meant to be away in India in the book. What if Digory grew up in India and had a friend there before his mum’s sickness brought them back to London. It would be quite a change from the book - and I don’t know how they’d find screen time for the subplot, but it would be one possibility.

Posted by: @davidd

So would that mean that Frank and Hellen bring a child into Narnia?

Not necessarily. The book mentions they have children in Narnia that become the nation of Archenland. But your suggestion is certainly an interesting possibility as well. 

Of all the suggestions so far, I like the idea of this new character being Frank and Helen's son the best. Sure, it's different from the book but it feels somewhat organic, for lack of a better word. We know from the book that they have kids eventually. And since Frank brings a wife to Narnia from his own world, it's not a big stretch to have him bring a kid too. I don't really see why it's necessary, but it doesn't strike me as contrary to the spirit of the book.  

Posted by: @fantasia

Posted by: @impending-doom

And if we're throwing out other possibilities using the same casting logic (which I think is a good call @rose), this role could easily be the son of Frank the cab driver and his wife Helen. If Frank has already been cast behind the scenes as an Indian actor, that would explain why they’re now looking for a mixed-race boy to match. That could also be Gerwig’s way of planting the seeds for Narnia’s later human diversity in the later books.

I wanted to resurrect this thread because we know now that clearly Digory is NOT half-Indian in the movie. AND the appearance of Jadis's stunt double doesn't scream Indian descent to me either. 

Impending Doom's above thought has merit to me.

I also think that's a genuine possibility... well, almost anything is a genuine possibility with this particular adaptation, it seems, except for faithfulness to the original book, of course.    But I wouldn't object to Frank (or Helen!) being Indian or part Indian, and having a son who features in the story somehow. I've thought for a fair while that it would be nice if an adaptation of The Magician's Nephew could expand on the characters of Frank and Helen at least a little, just so that the first King and Queen of Narnia aren't two suddenly-introduced people whom we hardly know and who don't play any larger role in the plot. (Which is one of the very few faults of the original story, if it can be said to have any faults at all. )

Nowhere in the Chronicles that I can recall, does Lewis mention where the Calormen race comes from. (Please correct me if I'm wrong. They claim to be descendants of Tash....kind of like the Egyptians were descendants of Ra, right?)

He doesn't mention where they came from in the Chronicles themselves (unlike with the Telmarines), but in the timeline that he wrote up some time after finishing writing the books, he does give the Calormenes an origin:

Narnian year 180: Prince Col, younger son of Frank V, leads certain followers into Archenland (not then inhabited) and becomes first King of that country.

Narnian year 204: Certain outlaws from Archenland fly across the Southern desert and set up the new kingdom of Calormen.

Now the first part of that information contradicts what we're told at the end of The Magician's Nephew (the book, I mean), that it was the younger son of the original Frank and Helen who became the first King of Archenland. Lewis really was not good at remembering details of what he'd written before, and there are many contradictions like this between the books and the timeline, not to mention between the books themselves. But this is the only place (as far as I'm aware!) where he ever refers directly to the origins of the Calormene people, and he obviously did think of them as having the same origins as the Narnians and Archenlanders originally.

Personally, my head-canon is that there must have been a lot more incursions of humans from our world into Narnia (and the surrounding lands), at different times, than we're ever told about in the books. If Frank and Helen's children had all married nymphs and nature-gods as the ending of MN tells us, and their own descendents in turn had gone on doing the same, within a few generations there would have been almost no human blood left in Narnia's original royal family. And yes, we do have to assume that that royal family died out somehow before the return of Jadis as the White Witch, but the Archenlanders and Calormenes must have persisted during that time, and as far as we can tell, they're 100% human (or pretty much so). So I do reckon there must have been other human beings from our own world who got into Narnia early on, in similar ways to the ancestors of the Telmarines in Prince Caspian.

I have no idea if anything came from this casting call, but we've seen or heard nothing of Frank and Helen, and I wonder if they'll end up being the ancestors of the Calormen race, in addition to the Archenlanders. Maybe?

It could also be that this casting call was only put out because at the time, they were considering casting Digory as part Indian, and so the new casting call was not for an additional boy in the story, but as a replacement for the one now called "Boy 2". And possibly they didn't find a part Indian actor who was deemed suitable for the role, so they went back to the original plan of casting a white British boy. But we really don't know anything, except that with this particular movie we had probably better brace ourselves and expect the unexpected...