Across his career, Daniel Craig has dealt with major character archetypes: he’s played the super-spy, as James Bond. The ultimate detective as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out films. And now, we’re about to see him play a magician. More specifically, the magician of The Magician’s Nephew, in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories. It’s Craig’s Uncle Andrew that sets the whole affair in motion, a man who has spent his life tinkering with magical objects and artefacts, with life-changing results for his young nephew Digory (David McKenna) and neighbour Polly (Beatrice Campbell).
Since Andrew’s attention is firmly on all things sorcery, it comes at a cost to the people in his life that he should care about. “I’d like to say that his intentions are good, but I’m not sure that they are,” Craig admits to Empire. “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.” In Gerwig’s words? “He’s the stupidest magician in the world who actually made magic,” the writer-director puts it. Andrew’s actions have ramifications not just for Digory and Polly, but for Aslan (voiced in Gerwig’s film by Meryl Streep), the nefarious Jadis (Emma Mackey), and the fundamental existence of Narnia too.
Craig’s love of Narnia goes right back to his childhood, when he devoured The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe in a single sitting. “I stayed up all night and read it,” he remembers. “It was the first time I started a book and finished it near dawn, and I’d never read a book cover-to-cover before.” Here’s hoping, all these years later, that he and Gerwig are ready to make magic.
Read Empire’s full world-exclusive Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew cover story – going on set with Greta Gerwig and her cast, including Daniel Craig, Emma Mackey, and Meryl Streep, to get the first word on her epic fantasy adaptation – in the November 2026 issue, on sale Thursday September 24. Pre-order a copy online here. Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew comes to cinemas from February 12, 2027, and comes to Netflix from April 2, 2027.
