Narnia

An unusual casting choice has reportedly emerged for filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming screen version of The Magician’s Nephew—and it isn’t a human actor at all, but rather a long-dead tree.

A story published by The Bucks Herald claims that the production team behind the new Narnia adaptation acquired a deceased maple last September. The tree came from Startop Farm, located near the village of Marsworth on the boundary between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire in England.

The maple had become something of a local landmark thanks to its gnarled shape and the dramatic scars left by lightning strikes. To prepare it for its cinematic role, contractors dismantled the tree with great care, cutting off and labeling sections of branches so the entire structure could later be rebuilt precisely on the film set.

According to the report, the production first noticed the tree during the Marsworth Steam Rally in June, several months before it was transported away for use in the Narnia shoot.

Farm owner Josie Kempster explained that the maple is set to appear as “one of two apple trees in the wood.” However, the way the newspaper summarized and interpreted her comments leaves some ambiguity about whether the reference is to the Wood Between the Worlds or to the Tree of Protection—along with its real-world counterpart planted by the character Digory at the novel’s conclusion.

An accompanying image shows workers from Greens Team Ltd—a business known for providing plant-based set decoration for film and television—carefully dismantling the tree and loading it onto a flatbed truck.

The company recently shared a video on Instagram featuring a very similar dead tree. The clip demonstrates how their team modifies the branches of lifeless trees to create the convincing illusion of living foliage; in that particular case, the work was done for an Alice in Wonderland-themed installation at the Pinewood Studios Futures Festival.