@fantasia that's actually not a bad shout, and to be honest I don't see someone being high profile as necessarily being a problem... in many cases it can be a huge asset.

The two casting examples that always spring to mind for me are Superman (1978) and Batman Begins (2005)...

In the former film, the director was adamant he wanted two relative unknowns for the lead roles, and so to balance things out and appease the studio, he specifically went after the biggest actor in the world (Marlon Brando) to play the relatively minor role of Joe El.

And then in Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan knew he had a challenge on his hands to get people to take a comic book film seriously at the time, and so he purposefully went out of his way to stack the cast with absolute cinematic heavyweights across all of the supporting roles - Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer... All legends of the acting world, and a massive statement of intent from Christopher Nolan at the time.

I can therefore perhaps foresee that GG's Narnia might need to do something similar if they want the movie going world to sit up and take notice.

I don't always have an issue with using a big name celebrity. Sometimes it works, others it doesn't. However, with Mr. Cumberbatch, the thing that holds me back is that he had an extremely similar-type role as Doctor Strange. But the characters themselves are different enough it might still work. Looks-wise, he's spot on imho.

That's a fair point on Dr Strange. I do like Cumberbatch though. He's usually great in almost everything he does, and I would definitely lean towards a big prestige-level actor for the Uncle Andrew role to give the project a bit of gravitas.

I think aside from some of the names already mentioned, my long-list of actors would probably include the likes of the following (age in brackets)

• Paul Bettany (53)
• Hugh Laurie (65)
• Colin Firth (64)
• Richard E Grant (67)
• Hugh Grant (64)
• Jude Law (52)
• Mark Strong (61)
• Jason Issacs (61)
• Daniel Craig (56)

Those guys are all roughly in the sort of age bracket I had always imagined for Uncle Andrew... Even if logically the uncle of a 10 year old boy is more likely to be in his late 30s or 40s, rather than his 50s or 60s.

@icarus Uncle Andrew in the book describes himself as at least 60 — I can't quite remember where, but it's definitely in there. [Just found it in chapter 9, when he refers to himself as a fellow who has "turned sixty".]

I've always had the impression that he and Letty are close in age but there is a big age gap between them and their younger sister, Mabel, who is Digory's mother. Not impossible — in my dad's family there was a 15- or 16-year age gap between his oldest aunt and his youngest uncle, on his mother's side.

There could easily be an even bigger age gap if Digory's grandmother had her first two children when she was in her late teens / early 20s and her last (Digory's mother) in her 40s. I believe it wasn't uncommon for "late in life" pregnancies like that to happen in the past, when a woman may have assumed she was too old to have any more children (no reliable contraception in those days — the whole idea of it was heavily frowned upon in any case — and far less understanding of menopause and women's reproductive health in general), and then a surprise happened...

Digory is 12 at the time of the events of MN (at least according to Lewis's later and not-always-consistent Narnia timeline), so his mother is presumably over 30. (I'm sure a lot of us have this idea of women all getting married in their teens in the past, but I've just been looking online and the average age of marriage was more like early 20s for much of the Victorian era.) She'd have to be older than that for her oldest brother to be over 60, but again it's not impossible — their own mother might have been 18 or so when she had Andrew and as "old" as 45 when she had Mabel, so the gap between the siblings could be as many as 27 years, or possibly even slightly more.

And Mabel herself may not have got married at an ultra-young age. If she was 23 when Digory was born, and Andrew is (say) 25 years older than Mabel, that then makes him 60 when the story takes place — so, definitely possible.

Sorry for the long digression, but I find it interesting to look into how feasible these aspects of the books are, and it definitely does mean that Andrew could be as old as the book says he is and still have a 12-year-old nephew.

As to who should play him in a film version, I'd be open to almost any of the suggested actors, or else a complete unknown, just so long as they make him believable and suitably creepy! 

@courtenay, thanks for taking the time to look all that up. 🙂 I have a couple friends who had children when they were newly married and then had a child many, many years later. It happens. But far more unremarkably, I should also add that I was 41 when my niece was born, and my sister and I are only 5 years apart. And then on the other side of things, when my youngest was born, my brother-in-law was 51, and he's 12 years older than my husband. So even in my own family we have examples that match Uncle Andrew being in his 50s or 60s to Digory's 10. 

Having said that, I don't think Uncle Andrew's age is a deal breaker. He could be anywhere between 40-65 and it would work just fine.