'Sex Education' Star to Lead Greta Gerwig's 'Narnia'

Director Greta Gerwig has found her White Witch. The Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter has tapped Sex Education star Emma Mackey to play one of children's literature's most iconic villains in her new Netflix adaptation of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. Mackey previously appeared in Gerwig's blockbuster Barbie, but the role of an evil sorceress who plunges Narnia into an endless winter is quite a swerve.

In another intriguing twist, Gerwig's Narnia film franchise will reportedly not begin with Lewis's most famous novel, but rather its prequel. Although The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was the first Narnia book to be published, its story is not the first to take place chronologically. The Magician's Nephew is the sixth installment in the series, but it recounts events that occur a thousand years before those of Wardrobe, and chronicles the creation of Narnia itself. Its primary story follows Polly Plummer and Digory Kirke, two young children in Victorian England who essentially discover the multiverse through what is known as "the Wood Between the Worlds". (If the name sounds familiar, it's because Digory grows up to become Professor Kirke, the elderly owner of the house that holds the wardrobe.)

The book's hefty middle section not only explains how Aslan's world came into being, but the origins of many of the foreign elements in Narnia, from the lamp-post in the middle of nowhere, the existence of a human king and queen, and the presence of the White Witch herself, whose name we learn is Jadis. As you probably expected, much of this story echoes the biblical creation recounted in the Book of Genesis, but with a decidedly fantastical flair.