Meryl Streep Will Voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig's Narnia

Meryl Streep will voice Aslan in Greta Gerwig's upcoming adaptation of CS Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, and the casting has reignited a fight with conservative Christian commentators in the United States.

The three-time Oscar-winner will provide the voice of Narnia's Christ-like lion, a role that has traditionally been voiced and performed by male actors. News that Streep was in talks for the part first surfaced in April last year, prompting an immediate flurry of complaints from evangelical commentators. This week the controversy erupted again after Empire published a first look at the film together with an interview in which Gerwig confirmed the casting and explained her reasoning.

Gerwig's explanation, as reported in the Empire interview, was pragmatic rather than provocative. The director said she needed an actor over 70 who could convey both wisdom and childlike wonder — the two qualities that define Lewis's creation. Streep, who turned 76 in June, fits that brief. According to the director, the Barbie filmmaker did not set out to stoke controversy; she set out to find a voice.

The outrage has nonetheless been loud. Conservative Christian commentators in the US have returned to the fray, framing the casting as another instance of Hollywood imposing revisionism on beloved source material. The row places Gerwig's film — the first Narnia adaptation in over a decade — at the centre of America's culture wars before a single frame has been publicly screened beyond the Empire first look.

The casting sits within a broader pattern the source identifies in recent studio filmmaking: a run of revisionist retellings that reframe classic villains as heroines or damaged figures. The Wicked Witch of the West has been recast as the heroine; Cruella de Vil has been given a difficult childhood; Mufasa has been given an adoption backstory. Aslan, Lewis's, in the source's words, "messiah with a mane," now joins that roster — though in this case the revision extends to voice rather than character arc.

It is worth noting what the critics are not objecting to. Gerwig has not rewritten Aslan's role in the story, changed the character's nature or altered Lewis's narrative. She has cast a woman in her seventies to read the lines. Whether Aslan sounds male or female in the finished film remains to be heard; the source leaves open whether the lion "is a lioness — or at least, may sound like one."

The deeper question the source raises is one of proportion. Evangelical commentators directing their energy at a voice casting decision raises the question of priorities at a moment when, as the original piece puts it, "it is a confusing time to be alive." Streep, for her part, adds a Narnian lion to a career spanning five decades — and Gerwig's The Magician's Nephew gains a level of pre-release attention no marketing budget could buy. Whether the film's defenders and detractors will still be arguing about the casting when it reaches cinemas will depend on what audiences actually hear when Aslan first speaks.