Carey Mulligan Joins Greta Gerwig's 'Narnia'

Greta Gerwig's The Chronicles of Narnia adaptation is starting to come into focus. The Barbie director has reportedly tapped Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan (Saltburn) to join the cast. And though no one officially involved with the production has said this out loud yet, the news of Mulligan's casting—and more specifically, who she's meant to be playing—confirms that Gerwig's first Narnia film will not be based on C.S. Lewis's first Narnia book, but his sixth.

Though The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe may have been the first book in the series to be published, it is not the first Narnia story, chronologically speaking. That honor belongs to The Magician's Nephew, the sixth Narnia story to be published, but a prequel that provides a crucial origin story for many of Narnia's most familiar (and powerful) elements.

Set in Victorian England, the story follows Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, two children who essentially discover the multiverse thanks to their supposedly "mad" uncle Andrew, whose magical rings allow travel between worlds. The pair find themselves in a sleepy woodland known as the "Wood Between the Worlds," where they can visit different realms by jumping into various pools. Their adventures result in the freeing of Jadis, the White Witch, who follows them back to England for a brief attempt at conquest before the entire group finds themselves on the cusp of a world not yet made. Much of the book's hefty middle section mirrors the Biblical account of Genesis, exploring not just how Aslan's world and all its creatures came into being, but the origins of many of the foreign elements of Narnia, including lamp-post, the existence of a human king and queen, and how the wardrobe came to be.