The film won’t come out for another four months, but CT Movies editor Mark Moring has already posted his interview with Anna Popplewell, the young actress who plays Susan Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Here’s one interesting quote:
In the books, Aslan is clear that females should not go into battle. But you and Lucy are in the battles in the movie. Can you talk about that a bit?
Anna: That was a slight alteration we made because we felt that Susan and Lucy should [go into battle]. To be honest, the part that Susan and Lucy play in the battle, although it’s very important, is right at the end of the movie in terms of the “battles” where women fight. It’s not Susan and Lucy fighting all the way through the battle. But we thought that was important to include them in the battle. So, yeah, that is a difference from the book.
Ah yes, the female “empowerment” angle. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, in my books, but it does mark a change in sensibility from Lewis’s writing; and if the producers do go ahead with adaptations of the other stories, it will be interesting to see what they do with that bit in The Last Battle where we find out that Susan isn’t going to Heaven, so to speak — or at least not yet — because she’s too interested in “nylons, lipstick and invitations”. The producers could conceivably agree with Lewis that these are silly, stereotypical, pre-feminist obsessions — or they might insist that even these tokens of femininity should not pose any sort of barrier to a happy ending in the aferlife with Aslan.
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