Other Titles • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe • The Chronicles of Narnia
Hailing from a London family related to Charles Darwin, and the son of author Randall Keynes, Skandar impressed everyone on the set with his youthful smarts and wisdom.
Now 14, he had first read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as an eight-year-old, which is also when he was first completely taken by Edmund. “I prefer my character over all the others. I really think I have the best character,” the young actor says with his typical bravado. “Of course, he’s a lot like me. He is the tyrant of the family, which I am, and, yep, he succumbs to temptation very easily. Edmund is the black sheep of the family, always teasing Lucy. But, in the end, Narnia makes him good. He goes through the most radical change, starts to appreciate his family. The adventure really changes him into a better person.” Lucy Pevensie
Completing the quartet of children is ten-year-old Georgie Henley in the role of Lucy Pevensie, the youngest Pevensie and also the most optimistic, open-hearted and brave of them all, and who Adamson considers one of the story’s most important characters. “Lucy is the pure heart of the book. She’s the one who first enters Narnia, the one who has to deal with the disbelief of her siblings, and the one who has to have the spunk and energy to still believe in herself,” he says.
“Georgie Henley was just that. I knew from the moment I saw her on tape that she was Lucy, she was just so believable in her very first audition.”
Pippa Hall discovered Henley out of the blue on a visit to a school in Yorkshire. Despite having no acting experience, Henley had something much more important—she was an unusually intelligent, articulate and emotional child with a huge love of books. Later, she became a constant surprise on the set. “She was so original in her approach to the part that she made us see the dialogue in new ways, ways we hadn’t even imagined before,” comments producer Mark Johnson.
Like the other children, Georgie saw an immediate link between herself and her character. “Lucy is quite a lot like me in a way so it was very easy to slip into her character,” she says. “Lucy’s the youngest of the four Pevensies, and nobody takes her opinions seriously as the story begins. When she opens this wardrobe, she’s in a new world and she feels as though her feelings mean something there.”
With the children cast, Adamson’s next task was to bring them together as a close-knit family unit. “I wanted to create a strong family dynamic—but I couldn’t have hoped for it to go as well as it did,” he notes. “I’m sure a part of what developed between them was because they were all so far away from home that they kind of glommed onto each other. Part of it was the mix of personalities that I picked. Yet it was almost magical how they began to seem like a real family of siblings during production.”
To further help the children stay in the rhythm of the story, Adamson chose to shoot THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE entirely in chronological order—so that each new scene brought the young actors deeper into their characters and further into their discovery of Narnia.
Movie Database
In Theaters
