First Look at Daniel Craig as the Magician in Greta Gerwig’s NARNIA: THE MAGICIAN’S NEPHEW
Our first official look at Daniel Craig in Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew has arrived, and Greta Gerwig’s trip into C.S. Lewis’ fantasy world continues to look like one of the more unexpected adaptations Netflix has cooking.
Craig plays Andrew Ketterley, the magician at the center of the story, and the new image shared by Empire gives us our first look at the character. After years of watching Craig save the world as James Bond and crack murder cases as Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies, he’s now playing a magician who might be dangerously out of his depth.
Craig explained his take on Andrew, saying: "I'd like to say that his intentions are good, but I'm not sure that they are. It's not to say that he's cruel and mean and awful. He gets overexcited about what could be, and therefore overlooks the people around him and the consequences of what he's doing."
Greta Gerwig offered an even simpler description of the character, saying, "He's the stupidest magician in the world who actually made magic."
This sounds like a fun role for Craig, especially after the more controlled and capable characters we’re used to seeing him play.
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will be Gerwig’s follow-up to Barbie, which became a massive box office hit and turned into a major cultural event alongside the whole “Barbenheimer” craze. Gerwig is now jumping into an entirely different kind of fantasy world.
Published in 1955, The Magician’s Nephew was the second-to-last Narnia novel C.S. Lewis released, but chronologically it serves as a prequel to the other books. It explores the origins of Narnia and has never previously received a live-action movie adaptation.
The images released so far also point toward a pretty unusual visual direction for the film. Meryl Streep’s Aslan has reportedly been given a look influenced by 1970s-era David Bowie, while Emma Mackey, who reunites with Gerwig after Barbie, appears as Jadis in a shimmering silver sequined gown.
Combined with Craig’s Andrew Ketterley, the imagery seems to give off a ’70s glam rock and British progressive music for her version of Narnia. That’s certainly not the aesthetic most people would immediately associate with Lewis’ fantasy series, which makes seeing how Gerwig brings it all together part of the fun.
Gerwig is taking one of the most famous fantasy properties ever written and approaching it from a direction we haven’t seen on screen before. Considering The Magician’s Nephew deals with the creation of Narnia itself, there’s plenty of room for her to get weird with it.
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew will open in theaters on February 12, 2027, before arriving on Netflix in April 2027.