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
Unlike most of her cast-mates, Swinton came to the story completely fresh. “I’m one of the few people who was brought up in the UK who didn’t read any of the Narnia books as a child,” Swinton confesses. “So, I came to them entirely because of Andrew Adamson who asked me to be in this film. I then read the stories to my six-year-old children. They were the acid test. When they thought it was a good idea, I began to take the idea of the film seriously. Of course, it’s a tall order to play the epitome of all evil. I just might have children backing away from me for the rest of my life!”
It was also a tall order for an actress used to portraying the finer nuances of human emotion to take on a character for whom emotion is a foreign concept. “Jadis is not human, you have to remember. She has no feelings about anything,” Swinton notes. “She’s not really comprehensible on any normal level. She has created Narnia as a reflection of her own state of mind, freezing it into perpetual winter—no spring, no Christmas, no progress, no good, a pretty joyless place, until these children begin to turn it around.”
Swinton became closely involved in creating the look of the White Witch, which is so integral to her character. “We agreed that she should look modern and quite attractive in her own way. I thought about my favorite fantasy beauties like the Good Witch in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ that played away from the cliché of a villainess. I didn’t want to have any of the standards: black hair, red lips or black eyeliner.” She continues: “The idea we worked on with the costume was that it would be like a mood thermometer, that it would morph with her mood. She never changes dresses but the dress itself changes shape and color according to how things are going for her. When she’s at home in her ice castle, it puffs out like a ball gown, and when things are getting a little bleaker, the dress gets tighter and darker. And when things get really dark for her in the story, it goes completely black.”
In designing the gowns, replete with handmade lace, for Swinton’s character, costume designer Isis Mussenden envisioned “seven different gown changes for Tilda to physically represent her diminishing powers. As spring takes hold of Narnia, it melts away the frost and drains away the White Witch’s powerful hold on the frozen landscape.”
Ultimately, Swinton fell just as in love with Narnia as those who had first encountered it in childhood. She says: “THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE began to remind me of great family films that I grew up with, like ‘The Railway Children’ and ’The Wizard of Oz.’ It’s a classic story in that it has an old-fashioned quality but at the same time it feels entirely modern.”
The White Witch’s greatest rival in Narnia is Aslan, the wise and majestic lion who sang Narnia into existence and once served as high king of the land. To create this towering character, so beloved as a hero by so many, Adamson turned both to CGI wizardry and to acclaimed Academy Award®-nominated actor Liam Neeson, who creates Aslan’s charismatic personality through his voice. “Aslan is all-powerful and allknowing, yet still has a very human vulnerability,” observes Andrew Adamson.
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