A new report indicates that Greta Gerwig and Netflix’s upcoming The Chronicles of Narnia has cast feminist activist Carey Mulligan.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit claims that “Carey Mulligan is in negotiations to nab a key role in Narnia, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia fantasy novels.”
The report notes that this first film will be an adaptation of Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew and that Mulligan will play the sick mother of Digory. She is allegedly joined by Daniel Craig, who plays Digory’s Uncle Andrew as well as Emma Mackey as the White Witch, and Meryl Streep as a sex-swapped Aslan.
Mulligan’s recent films include The Ballad of Wallis Island, Spaceman, Maestro, Saltburn, and Promising Young Woman.
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During the promotion of Promising Young Woman, Mulligan made it clear she was a feminist activist and pilloried a movie reviewer by insinuating he was sexist and misogynistic.
After the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2020, Variety’s Dennis Harvey reviewed the film writing, “Mulligan, a fine actress, seems a bit of an odd choice as this admittedly many-layered apparent femme fatale — Margot Robbie is a producer here, and one can (perhaps too easily) imagine the role might once have been intended for her.”
“Whereas with this star, Cassie wears her pickup-bait gear like bad drag; even her long blonde hair seems a put-on. The flat American accent she delivers in her lowest voice register likewise seems a bit meta, though it’s not quite clear what the quote marks around this performance signify,” Harvey continued.
Harvey then went on to praise Mulligan, “Still, like everything here, this turn is skillful, entertaining and challenging, even when the eccentric method obscures the precise message. Promising Young Woman is often at its most inspired when contradicting itself — one of the grimmest scenes here is accompanied by something utterly incongruous from The King and I, and the frisson between image and song is so flummoxing it’s rather brilliant.”
Ahead of the film’s December 2020 release, Mulligan spoke to the New York Times and insinuated that Harvey’s review wreaked of sexism and misogyny. She said, ““I read the Variety review, because I’m a weak person. And I took issue with it.”
She continued, “It felt like it was basically saying that I wasn’t hot enough to pull off this kind of ruse.”
“It wasn’t some sort of ego-wounding thing — like, I fully can see that Margot Robbie is a goddess,” Mulligan would later add. “It drove me so crazy. I was like, ‘Really? For this film, you’re going to write something that is so transparent? Now? In 2020?’ I just couldn’t believe it.”
“We don’t allow women to look normal anymore, or like a real person. Why does every woman who’s ever onscreen have to look like a supermodel? That has shifted into something where the expectation of beauty and perfection onscreen has gotten completely out of control,” she stated.
She concluded, “I just don’t think that’s really what storytelling or acting needs to be about. Things can be beautiful without being perfect.”
After Mulligan made her comments, Variety added an editor’s note to the review, "Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of Promising Young Woman that minimized her daring performance.”
Harvey defended himself telling The Guardian, “I did not say or even mean to imply Mulligan is ‘not hot enough’ for the role.”
“I’m a 60-year-old gay man. I don’t actually go around dwelling on the comparative hotnesses of young actresses, let alone writing about that,” he added.
From there he shared that he was “appalled to be tarred as misogynist which is something very alien to my personal beliefs or politics. This whole thing could not be more horrifying to me than if someone had claimed I was a gung-ho Trump supporter.”
Next, he explained the part of his review that Mulligan seemingly took issue with, ““I assumed that film-makers who created such a complex, layered movie wouldn’t interpret what I wrote as some kind of simpleminded sexism. And while Carey Mulligan is certainly entitled to interpret the review however she likes, her projection of it suggesting she’s ‘not hot enough’ is, to me, just bizarre. I’m sorry she feels that way. But I’m also sorry that’s a conclusion she would jump to, because it’s quite a leap.”
What do you make of Mulligan being cast in the Narnia film?
Of all the stuff I will never see, I will never see this one the most.
This project is developing a Rings of Power smell to it.