I was going to sleep on this before posting, but I don't know if I'll be able to sleep unless I get this out. This has been a roller coaster of emotions for me.

I've been defending Greta Gerwig ever since we started getting interviews of her talking about her love and reverence for Narnia and C. S. Lewis. There was a lot of skepticism when she was announced. I understood it, but I also thought a lot of people were jumping the gun. It's common for the internet to hate things before there is sufficient evidence to warrant it. I like to counter that by giving things the benefit of the doubt and keeping an open mind as much as I can. Maybe that makes me naive sometimes because now it seems like early detractors were right all along.

I actually don't have an issue with this theologically. At least I don't think. I'm not a theologian, but I do think of God as being beyond gender. It doesn't seem heretical to me to imagine a scenario where the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate as a female. Is it any crazier than an incarnation as a talking lion? God is the creator of male and female, so it makes sense He would encompass both qualities, and there are numerous Biblical examples of God being spoken of in feminine language. 

However. This isn't just about theology. This is about adaptation. Aslan is a character I love and has meant the world to me throughout my life. A female Aslan just isn't Aslan. I also can't see this being a decision C. S. Lewis would be happy with.

I just don't see the point of it. Narnia has several fantastic female characters that can be celebrated on screen. There are even ways you could adapt them to give them greater prominence. Give Polly more of a character arc. Give Jill a more active role in defeating the Lady of the Green Kirtle. Give hope that Susan might regain her faith later in life. But gender swapping Aslan? That feels like a false rumour started by someone wanting to stir up a social media hornet's nest... and that's precisely why I thought that's what this was.

It feels unnecessarily provocative. They have to know that this is going to cause a giant controversy. This movie could have brought the Narnia stories into the cultural conversation and helped to give them the respect they deserve. I hope I'm wrong, but right now it feels like this is destined to just be the internet's next big flame war. And for no good reason. I feel exhausted just thinking about it... 😞   

It would not make me angry if a female voice was chosen for Aslan, but I am kind of baffled at the idea. There are other roles that Meryl Streep could play such as the White Witch and with her experience it would be much better than if she tried to do the Lion. I hope that Greta Gerwig will deeply consider what is in the books before making her choice. And C. S. Lewis’s choice of gender for the Lion should be the same as her choice. 

I had too wondered if the initial rumor started was a well coordinated prank- trust me, I had major flashbacks to the April Fool's prank from over a decade ago with the fake Magician's Nephew script. But alas, when Deadline picked it up... the joke was over. 

Part of me wanted to have a visceral reaction, yet part of me doesn't want to get too riled up for the moment. It's so easy for social media to feed the reaction and the reactors. Controversy is how views and likes are generated these days, and it's no uncertainty that Greta Gerwig would be unaware of how this would be perceived by the public. 

The most optimistic thing I'm leaning toward is that this is a choice done out of creativity in that Aslan will still be male, but his voice will be more feminine sounding. Most audio and visual adaptations have featured Aslan with a rather rich and low tone. Perhaps incorporating a female tone will give this Aslan a more "nurturing" tone? 

It wouldn't be the first time that filmmakers have tried to expand the representation of God's voice outside of a booming voice in The Ten Commandments style. It's somewhat ironic this Narnia news has come up at the same time we're mourning the loss of Val Kilmer who portrayed Moses in The Prince of Egypt- who also ended up being the main voice of God. I found this behind the scenes article which states:

A case in point is the creation of the voice of God for the pivotal scene when Moses hears from his maker via the burning bush. 'That was a particularly interesting challenge for me, and something that I was very fond of working on,' comments Nick Fletcher. 'I remember we tried so many different versions of that. Being that it had the theological aspect to it that you don't really get in most movies, some brilliant ideas just didn't work on religious grounds....I did a version myself using the actors, actresses and children within the film, kind of morphing from one voice to another, which for me was great fun to do and produced a pretty amazing sound. But it crossed the line theologically and so we had to abandon that idea.'

I'll try not to worry unless the first images of Aslan show a lioness instead of a lion.

Posted by: @whitestag

Now the only male figures in the story will be  the deluded and pathetic Uncle Andrew - just like with Ken (and the Mattel bosses) in Barbie. And Frank the cabbie - Sadly, it seems audiences will have to rely solely on Frank for some positive masculinity.

FWIW, as I mentioned before on this thread, Gerwig's Little Women had a positive male authority figure in Mr. Laurence Sr. Actually, it had two with the heroines' father. (He was implied to be more flawed than he was in the original book but that was bringing him closer to Louisa May Alcott's father who was the basis for the literary version-and the movie's version was still more idealized than he was. ) 

I looked up Meryl Streep on Wikipedia, and sure enough, there are retired or semi-retired people who are much younger than she is. So far, as far as I have read, she is only in "talks", which can always fall through. Meryl Streep is particularly noted for her ability in mastering accents, even an Australian accent when she played in Evil Angels, as Lindy Chamberlain of Uluru fame. So, I wonder if that could be another reason why she came to mind, when we have been discussing the accents of the hecklers who called Jadis, the "Hempress of Colney Hatch". Somewhere else, I read that she was also due to feature in the sequel to "The Devil wears Prada", and on an MSN article, I learned that "Despite plenty of speculation, no cast members have been officially confirmed for Gerwig's The Chronicles of Narnia adaptation."

Some further rumours: Daniel Craig perhaps for Uncle Andrew, whilst Charli XCX is said to be a possible White Witch. I think that the likes of MSN & other news items like to keep us all guessing.  

I think what adds to the sadness is that Narnia is about to become massive in the public consciousness all around the world. Narnia will be introduced to many for the first time, and yet with this news, it'll feel like a false Narnia masquerading as the real one - if you know what I mean.

Honestly, the more I think about this rumour — if it really is going to turn out to be true — the less sense it makes. For a whole range of reasons, as so many people have already pointed out. Not just the turn-off that it is for probably the vast majority of fans, but for business reasons as well. Gender-swapping a role isn't even a particularly new or radical idea these days. But to do it with (purportedly) an actress who's white, wealthy, and has been Hollywood A-list material (deservedly so, too) for some four decades already...??? If it was being proposed for a young up-and-coming black actress from somewhere in Africa, or indeed almost anyone else from a not white-middle-class-American background, there'd at least be the diversity card to play here. But as it is, there isn't.

And really, I'd say there might be some sense in it if this was a remake of a story that had been adapted for the screen several times before — in the case of Narnia, that would have to be LWW — and then there'd be some justification for a director to want to do something radically different with it. I'm not saying a female Aslan (and maybe a male White Witch??) would be a good idea for a new version of LWW, but at least then we could say, here's a totally fresh interpretation of a story everyone's seen before, taking it in a really new direction.

A bit like the proposed 1990s LWW remake where the children were going to be modern Americans and the White Witch was going to win Edmund over with enchanted cheeseburgers. It would undoubtedly have been bad, but it might just have fitted into the category of so-bad-it's-good, because at least it would have been a new take (however ridiculous) on a story that had already had some successful "straight" adaptations.

But in this case, Netflix is almost certainly adapting The Magician's Nephew, which is a Narnia story that has never been adapted for the screen before at all. It's not something that's already familiar to movie-goers and so at least some audiences might be interested to see a really different and edgy remake. AND it's supposed to be the first in a series, not just a stand-alone piece — Netflix has the rights to adapt all seven books, and it's been said from the start of Gerwig's official involvement that she's expected to direct at least two of them. If Aslan is female in MN, then he — she — will have to be female for the rest of the series. The whole thing (if this is true) is looking like a monumental marketing disaster before it even happens.

And Aslan is a known character already, and an outright iconic one, getting back to what I was saying. If they gender-swapped a character who only has a substantial role in this one Narnia story and who hasn't been seen on screen before (like Fledge, as I suggested earlier), that would probably be neither here nor there. Or if this were a more obscure, barely-known fantasy series with a Christian basis and someone decided to make the God/Christ-figure female, just for a change, they could quite possibly get away with it. But Aslan?!?!

(In all honesty — and I speak as a major fan of Tolkien as well — I'd rather see a new adaptation of The Hobbit and/or LOTR with a female Gandalf. At least there's the fair excuse that TH has no female characters at all in the original book and LOTR doesn't have enough of them — and again, since both of those stories have been done on screen more than once before, one could argue there's room for a radical reinterpretation, whether or not anyone likes it.)

Maybe it's just the denial stage of grief, but I am seriously still hoping this is nothing but a silly false rumour — either a deliberate ploy or a misinterpretation — and in time to come we'll be laughing at the memory of how aghast everyone was for a few days or weeks there. But for now, we just don't know...  

@justin I agree wholeheartedly

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

I looked up Meryl Streep on Wikipedia, and sure enough, there are retired or semi-retired people who are much younger than she is. So far, as far as I have read, she is only in "talks", which can always fall through. Meryl Streep is particularly noted for her ability in mastering accents, even an Australian accent when she played in Evil Angels, as Lindy Chamberlain of Uluru fame.

Indeed, and (presumably like you and most others here) even I don't think there's a need for Aslan to have an Australian accent. (No, seriously. )

But if Meryl Streep is simply in "talks" because she has a great ability to master accents, which she does — well... how does that really benefit a film of The Magician's Nephew? Wagga has mentioned the Cockney accents necessary for the Jadis in London scene, but plenty of actors can do those (and hopefully more accurately than a certain notorious effort by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins  ). There's no need to pull in an ultra-famous A-list actress just for that reason. 

And again, even if Gerwig for some reason does want Aslan to be female, or to have a feminine voice... why Meryl Streep, in particular? I did wonder if Aslan's singing voice will be a blend of voices from different actors, some of them possibly female, but as at least one other contributor here has said, Streep doesn't have a particularly distinguished singing voice. (She did a good job of the title character in the movie Florence Foster Jenkins, about a famously, cluelessly BAD singer — and I remember watching that one and thinking Streep's singing wasn't actually quite as awful as that of the real-life Florence.)

And for Aslan's speaking voice... even if we were talking about a character who is definitely meant to be female, and whose voice is meant to convey power and wisdom and compassion and majesty and awesomeness all rolled into one, I still don't think I'd immediately think of Meryl Streep for that role. Perhaps an older African woman with a really deep and resonant voice (I'm sorry I can't think of a specific person, or I would most definitely name one) — or else a senior British actress who's acknowledged as pretty much an elder stateswoman of the stage and screen, like Dame Judi Dench. (Who, incidentally, is a deeply committed Quaker, so I can genuinely imagine her playing the role of a wise female divine being.)

But... we're still talking about Aslan, and I'm still stumped as to any good reason to have a female or even just female-voiced Aslan. The only reason I can actually think of for that is to do a big "Nyah nyah, ha ha, everyone knows this Lion is meant to be Jesus, so let's just make him a her to get all these silly Christians riled up while we show that, contrary to their stupid sexist religion, there's absolutely no reason why God can't be female, ha ha ha!"   And I mean... what would that achieve, especially if it really is going to happen with a new adaptation of an already hugely popular and beloved children's classic that everybody knows as featuring a male Lion?

Also, the part for me that really doesn't add up is that Gerwig herself has sounded sincerely respectful in all her comments about both Narnia and Lewis to date (here's the link @icarus shared earlier to the summaries of everything she's said publicly about the project). This one particular quote doesn't seem to be in there and I can't find where I read it ages ago, but I'm sure I remember reading somewhere that, very soon after Gerwig's involvement in this Narnia adaptation was first announced, she mentioned it very briefly in an interview and acknowledged that she was nervous about the project because "you don't want to mess with that Lion!" Or words to that effect.

So... why would she now be unarguably messing with that Lion???  

It's because of all these glaring makes-no-sense factors that I'm still holding to the belief that this is a false rumour and it's not going to happen. And if it does happen — well, as I keep saying, I'll still watch it at least once to see what it's actually like, but I can only think it'll go down in history as one of the worst own goals in the history of Hollywood.

I've been under a rock for a few days – came back here and now see this is confirmed at least for discussions with Streep. Eek! 😮 

I can't say too much more but echo some  concerns addressed: that it just does not make sense. Aslan is a core character of Narnia; think of the series and a maned lion is often one of the top associations. I think it would be utterly silly to consider a lioness (as lovely and impressive though they are!) – Aslan's intended form is part of what gives him real presence.

If it were more her giving her voice to still a male lion, presumably in a deeper form somehow, how does that make sense?! Then just get a good male actor's voice – plenty of them around! 

I've not given up yet uet. I'm not against Streep having a role in Narnia – but not like this.

Posted by: @sir-cabbage

I've not given up yet uet. I'm not against Streep having a role in Narnia – but not like this.

I wholeheartedly agree. I would love to see Meryl Streep be a part of the franchise in some other way that makes sense. But this just isn't the way. With a single strange casting choice, the filmmakers have already alienated half, if not the most of Narnia fans.

I genuinely hope that they reconsider.

But I also want to echo what the true Aslan would say: "Courage Dear Heart."

Let's bravely and respectfully make our voices heard. And see what happens.

I'm excited to see if the Narnia Web team figures out a way to voice our concerns in a impactful way.

I just saw the petition started by "Into the Wardrobe" over on X. I went ahead and signed it. I don't know if I'm allowed to share the link here (would that be ok, mods?). If anyone is interested you can look it up for yourself.