Sometimes it seems like they act like a character is a main character, but really it just means they have a few lines. It doesn't really mean they are an important character to the storyline.

Quick note that discussion about Digory's heritage in relation to this casting call should go in Digory's Ethnic Background.

Posted by: @impending-doom

Okay. Now you're making a part of me actually want to see this idea... stop it  

I'm sorry!  

I have to say, having Jadis say this to a son/brother/nephew before trading his life for the knowledge of the Deplorable Word could be pretty cinematic...

"Foolish boy. Why do you run from me? I mean you no harm. If you do not stop and listen to me now you will miss some knowledge that would have made you happy all your life."

Plus, Jadis being willing to sacrifice a relative in her quest for knowledge and power would be another link between her choices and those of Uncle Andrew. (Yes, we know she sacrificed lots of relatives when speaking the Deplorable Word, but this is a more direct parallel.)

I also wonder if, when writing the script, Gerwig came to the conclusion that Jadis needed a conversation partner for the third act of the story when she's alone apart from the scene in the garden. I don't know if I agree with that (and to be fair, I'm not a script writer), but I could imagine an adaptation where Jadis sees the ghosts of Charn in her imagination when telling Digory and Polly about what she did, and then one ghost doesn't fade away and continues to haunt her, appearing intermittently throughout the film as a figment of her guilt and a threat of what awaits her in death.

If Boy 1 is an entirely new lead character, I think this is my best case scenario.

They're probably going to do some sort of visual when it comes to the destruction of Charn I think Jadus just talks about it, but it seems so visual. I am still annoyed they are doing MN first. It just ruins LWW to know what Jadus is before she kills Aslan. I hope they don't try and make her sympathetic.

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So... is there any way to reconcile this theory if Charli XCX is no longer in the running for Jadis  

@impending-doom I still think it's a plausible theory overall.

The potential twist with the ethnicity angle maybe gave it a little bit of extra edge, but overall I still think it makes more sense for Boy 1 to be related to Jadis than it does for him to be Digory, since it otherwise requires that we rearrange and juggle with a lot of previously established facts to get there.

Out of all the rumours we've had in the past few weeks, "Boy 1/Boy 2" certainly feels like the most ambiguous, so I think any good theory here is still valid.

I have to disagree with you there @icarus, I personally think reimagining Digory’s ethnicity is a far smaller leap than introducing an entirely new character and motivation with no source material precedent, wheres (as we've said many times) there is precedent for Digory's father to be in Indian.

Especially when the casting call seems to suggest that Boy 1's importance is greater than the other characters? Surely, having Jadis' son have that much importance requires more rearranging and juggling of previously established facts than simply changing the ethnicity of our main character?

@rilianix 

Its more the case that we have a fairly clear chain of evidence to suggest that:

• Girl 1 = Open Ethnicity + Important / Lead Role = Original Casting Call = Frannie
• Boy 2 = Open Ethnicity + Important / Lead Role = Original Casting Call = isadore

Therefore, it still just makes most sense to me to consider Boy 1 as the anomaly... and i can easily debate away the semantic hierarchy of whether 1 is more important than 2, since really that's all we've got to suggest that he is more so the lead than the others (especially given that the other two have the distinction of being labelled "important" as well as "Leads"). 

To me, the biggest indicator of importance here is that the original casting call for Girl 1 and Boy 2 went out in January, whereas Boy 1 didn't appear until April, long after most of the primary auditions had already taken place. It just doesn't make sense to me to audition for "random other boy" months before you audition for Digory.

In either case though, given that the ethnicity is irrelevant for Girl 1 and Boy 2 as well, all we are really debating is who the extra boy is... and if we are saying this extra character has to be at least as important to the overall plot as Polly (following the Boy 2 theory), if not more so (following the Boy 1 theory) then to me, the most logical solution to that conundrum would be for them to be related to Jadis in someway.

Nothing else proposed really seems to fit otherwise. If we are looking for someone who logic dictates needs to be either as important, or more important, than Polly - then i think its got to be something pretty significant, and a child of Jadis would certainly fit the bill.

I definitely see where you’re coming from, but at the same time, there’s no concrete evidence that Boy 2 is the same character as the earlier casting call. It’s totally possible that the script evolved, or that the direction for Digory shifted after seeing early auditions.

That said, I’m not sure the most logical explanation is that this character would be related to Jadis. It’s not a bad theory, and honestly it’s something I wouldn’t put past Gerwig to explore, but to me, a more grounded and lore-consistent possibility for Boy 2 is that he’s a young Andrew Ketterley. His backstory is deeply tied to the origin of the rings and the magical worldbuilding, and he’s just as central to The Magician’s Nephew as Digory or Polly. If we’re talking about a role being described as both “important” and a “lead,” a younger version of Andrew would still qualify, even with the adult version of Andrew being obviously more prominent in terms of screen time or performance weight.

And on the note of casting specificity: again the reference to India in the Boy 1 listing feels far more in line with Digory’s backstory, (his father being away in India), whereas a “son of Jadis” being Indian doesn’t really connect to anything in the source material. Why would that specific heritage be relevant to her character or legacy? It just feels less supported by what we know.

Overall, anything can happen, but my instincts just lean more in these directions.

I still very much prefer the theory that after doing an initial run of auditions for Polly and Digory (“Frannie” and “Isadore”), Gerwig and co. decided to explore the idea of casting Digory as part-Indian — as an option, not as a definite and essential thing about the character — and so they added this casting call for a “lead” boy character of that background, the same age as the previous ones who had auditioned.

That way, if they find an Anglo-Indian boy actor who suits what they’re looking for in Digory, they’ll go down that route; if they decide one of the white boys is the best fit overall, they’ll pick him and drop the whole idea of changing Digory’s ethnic background.

That is by far the simplest explanation, since it totally avoids the HUGE complications of creating an entirely new child role, for a boy the same age as Digory and Polly and possibly of equal or greater importance to theirs in the plot. (Which is a problem we’ve got whether Boy 1 (Anglo-Indian) is the totally new character and Boy 2 is Digory, or Boy 1 is Digory and Boy 2 is the new character.)

It’s not impossible that Gerwig, or any other creatively-minded director, could decide to give Jadis a son, in order to make her a more complex character. But where does that get us other than sending the plot in a totally different direction that I can’t see enhancing the story at all? There’s the interesting theory someone proposed earlier, that perhaps Jadis had a son and was obliged to sacrifice his life in order to learn the secret of the Deplorable Word, and that was the “terrible price” she paid for it. (And then that could in turn complicate her relationship with Digory, because he reminds her of her own son, and so on.) 

But considering that the Deplorable Word is what enabled Jadis to sacrifice the life of EVERY living thing in her entire world at one stroke, entirely for her own purposes, and she shows absolutely no regret about having done so… I really don’t think that theory fits. Unless they are going to change her character, and the whole story, beyond recognition, and — as I said — drag it off in a direction that will have little or nothing to do with the creation of Narnia and Digory’s own hopes of saving his mother, which in the end are the most important elements of this story.

And the theory that either of the boy characters is Uncle Andrew as a child doesn’t make any real sense either. The age given is 10-12 years, and that seems far too young to be the age at which Andrew inherited the mysterious box from his godmother and began his quest to find out where it came from and what could be done with it. We don’t get that much detail from what he tells Digory, but he says that part of that process involved “learning a good deal in other ways (it wouldn’t be proper to explain them to a child) about Magic in general.” That very strongly implies that Andrew was not a child himself at that time. (Don’t forget, in the Victorian era and for a long time after, the age of majority in the UK was 21, which is even less close to 10-12 than today’s legal adult age of 18.)

I’ve no doubt, by the way, that Andrew as a 12-year-old was an unusual and probably already rather weird and creepy young boy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was already doing odd little part-scientific, part-magical “experiments” at that age. But that doesn’t seem directly relevant to the plot of MN, not to the point where it warrants making him at that age into a major character. Andrew in his 20s or 30s, maybe, but not Andrew before he’s even an adolescent.

(And there's also the fact that if this is Boy 1 we're talking about, it's extremely unlikely to be Uncle Andrew, since he can't be part-Indian without his two sisters — Letty (Digory's aunt) and Mabel (Digory's mother) — being the same. Unless he's only their half-brother, but that's adding even more complications that are totally unnecessary to the story.)

So until we hear anything to the contrary, I’m sticking with the Ockham’s Razor conclusion as the most likely — Boy 1 and Boy 2 are two different castings for Digory himself.

Some really good points @courtenay, however, while his age seems too young for the timeline of inheriting the box, I wouldn't put it past Gerwig or any adapter of this novel to see a child version of Andrew as a way to thematically align Andrew with Digory and Polly. Like them, Andrew starts with curiosity and innocence before being drawn into magic’s darker consequences. Showing Andrew as a child could provide insight into how his early experiences shape his future, paralleling Digory’s growth and moral journey, and tying in well with Lewis' focus on the transformative journeys of children.

@rilianix That's a fair point, but even if Andrew's journey in learning Magic did start when he was the age Digory is now (in the story), it obviously continued well beyond that, and into territory that is implicitly not appropriate to show in a book or movie aimed at children. He's already over 60 when we meet him, in any case, and even if they make him a bit younger — say 50-ish — that's still a lot of time between his own boyhood and the time when he actually makes the magic rings. Which, for the purposes of the plot, he needs to have only recently done when Digory and Polly find his study, since he's at the point of experimentally using the rings on guinea-pigs and now he's going to trick Polly into taking one and then blackmail Digory into going after her so he (Andrew) can see if both the "outward" and "return" rings really work.

So basically, whatever experiments he may have done or adventures he may have had as a 12-year-old aren't likely to be directly relevant to the work he's doing at the time when the story takes place.

And as I just added to my previous post, if it's Boy 1 we're talking about — the one who is half British, half Indian — then that really isn't likely to be Andrew, unless they're going to make Digory's mother and aunt half Indian too. Which all seems far more complicated than making Digory British on his mother's (and uncle's) side and Indian on his father's, if that's what they're considering doing.

@courtenay I see what you mean, but I still think it could work as more of an insight into his early fascination with magic and set the stage for his later actions, as I also don't think they'll explore too much of Andrew's background and journey within flashbacks; some (maybe even most) of it will be exposition. For example, I can't imagine we'll actually see his years of research or those incidents referred to, I imagine we'd simply see the beginnings of it and the seed being planted, again to possibly align with the themes of curiosity and moral complexity explored through Digory and Polly.

And also get what you mean about his experiments or adventures not being directly relevant to the work he's doing at the time, but I feel that having him be that age when he's given the box and experiencing some sort of magic for the first time could be.

As for your addition, I agree and I'm firmly in the camp of Digory being the boy of half British, half Indian descent. As you've stated it's really unlikely that'll be Andrew and if we're to take the Daniel Craig rumour seriously, then that's not the case at all. Overall, it just makes so much sense for Boy 1 to be Digory Kirke - in my opinion. I'm certainly more sure of that than I am of a young Andrew, I just feel a young Andrew being Boy 2 feels most logical at this stage in comparison to Jadis' son