C.S. Lewis never pretended Aslan was just a lion. In his Narnia books the great beast is the story’s Christ figure, the creator who dies and returns, and every actor who voices him inherits that weight along with the mane. So when the man who carried the role through the earlier film cycle finally weighed in on his successor, he skipped the polite tribute and went straight for the theology.

Liam Neeson, Aslan’s screen voice in the Walden Media adaptations, heard on camera that Meryl Streep will voice the lion in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. “I’m sorry, this is news to me,” he admitted when a ScreenRant reporter raised the new adaptation. Told who had taken over, he answered: “Meryl is playing Jesus Christ? Well, if you’re going to make Christ a lady, nobody better than Meryl.” As Deadline noted in its write-up, it amounts to a seal of approval, delivered as a joke.

The joke lands on what is genuinely new about Gerwig’s choice. The Magician’s Nephew is the book in which Aslan sings Narnia into existence, which makes it the most openly creator-centred story in the cycle, and Gerwig has handed that voice to a woman. Neeson did not frame it as a provocation. He treated it as a question of craft, and on craft he did not hesitate.

Gerwig, who wrote and directed the film, has said much the same. She told Empire that she wanted “someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness,” someone “older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child.” Her conclusion: “That list is not a long one.”

Neeson’s endorsement matters because he remains the big-screen benchmark for the role. The Oscar nominee from Schindler’s List voiced Aslan in all three Chronicles of Narnia films, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008) and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), and the franchise has had no other cinematic lion since. Sixteen years on, the handover now has the blessing of the man who held it.

Netflix’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew opens in theaters on February 12, 2027.

ScreenRant posted the exchange as a clip of Neeson learning the news “in real time”. The voice that roared through three Narnia films found out about its successor from a reporter’s question, weeks after Gerwig had already explained her pick to the press.

Tags: casting, Meryl Streep, Greta Gerwig, Liam Neeson, Narnia: The Magician's Nephew