Counterfeit Aslan

Hardy surprised to read "...that members of [C.S. Lewis'] family are 'very upset' by Meryl Streep's casting as Aslan in Netflix's upcoming Narnia adaptation and are attempting to 'regain control' of the company that manages the literary and media rights to Lewis' works." Greta Gerwig was probably not the best choice to direct an adaptation of The Magician's Nephew:

Gerwig, who grew up as a Unitarian Universalist, has said she envisions her adaptation of The Magician's Nephew to be "a rock opera," claiming, "David Bowie saved my life. Paul McCartney saved my life. David Gilmour saved my life. Pete Townshend saved my life. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant. ... Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan."

In a 2018 interview, Gerwig said she feels "uncomfortable around 'Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior stuff,' I find that creepy, but I go to church every Sunday." She claimed she would attend multiple services across different denominations on the same day, but noted she appreciates prayers to the Virgin Mary because "it feels like this 'God the Father' thing is a bit alienating for me."

Liel Leibovitz, at The Free Press, explains "Why You Should Care That Aslan Is a Woman":

To understand why, it helps to first know Aslan.

Read the series’ first novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and you’ll learn the following about everyone’s favorite leader of the pride: Sacrificing himself to save the sinful boy Edmund, he allows himself to be bound to a stone table and slain. Then—no spoiler, I hope, for a book published 76 years ago—he comes back from the dead because of the deeper magic he possesses, which he inherited from his father, Narnia’s supreme spiritual being, who is known only as Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who Aslan is meant to emulate. Any fifth grader could point toward Jesus—which is precisely what a class full of actual fifth graders argued in a letter to Lewis in 1954. The author, however, wrote back right away, telling the children they had it dead wrong.

“I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia,’ ” Lewis wrote from his office in Oxford Magdalen College. “I said ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.’ If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing.”

.... All the author did was project Christ into a different world, where, he told another correspondent, “He would really have been a physical object...as He was in Palestine and His death on the Stone Table would have been a physical event no less than His death on Calvary.” And if little boys and girls walked away from the books loving Aslan, then the faithful author would’ve achieved his goal....

Lewis, in fact, was so eager for his readers to understand this point that he had Aslan deliver it forcefully and clearly in the end of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the fifth novel in the Narnia series. In one climactic moment, Aslan tells the children that he exists in their world, too. “But there,” he adds, “I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” ....

I may yet, of course, be wrong. Gerwig’s Magician’s Nephew may reveal itself to be a faithful and respectful adaptation. But all signs point to the contrary. ....

[Gerwig]’s not merely telling us that the Ghostbusters now ought to be women because #girlpower. She’s taking the most beloved, prominent, and resonant bit of Christian storytelling created in the past 100 years and seemingly turning it into something not only radically different but anathema to the original. (more)

The illustration is Pauline Baynes' from The Last Battle, of the ape "Shift" with the donkey "Puzzle," who is wearing a lion suit: a "counterfeit Aslan"

Liel Leibovitz, "Why You Should Care That Aslan Is a Woman," The Free Press, Sept. 25, 2026.