First Look at Jadis and Strawberry in Leaked Clip from The Magician's Nephew Set

This week as cameras started rolling on The Magician’s Nephew we have our first clip from the film that comes leaked to social media straight from the film set in London. Febe Pritchard saw Greta Gerwig’s crew filming on a street near his neighborhood and published two Instagram reels giving fans the first glimpse at actual footage from the movie (Pritchard, 2025). The clip embedded at the bottom of this article appears to come from the middle of The Magician’s Nephew.

“First came the hansom. There was no one in the driver’s seat. On the
roof—not sitting, but standing on the roof—swaying with superb balance as
it came at full speed round the corner with one wheel in the air—was Jadis
the Queen of Queens and the Terror of Charn. Her teeth were bared, her
eyes shone like fire, and her long hair streamed out behind her like a
comet’s tail. She was flogging the horse without mercy. Its nostrils were
wide and red and its sides were spotted with foam. ” (Lewis, 1955)

In this key moment from the middle of the book Jadis’s rampage crashes a horse-drawn Hansom cab into a lamppost which breaks but becomes the seed of key Narnia lore. Several additional horse-drawn Hansom cabs and police constables arrive at the scene where a commotion occurs. The photos and video circulating online show a scene where this time Digory is riding horseback with Jadis on a rampage down a London street set in the 1950’s. Absent from the location shoot photos are any horse-drawn Hansom cabs which seem to have been replaced entirely by police cars and 1950’s automobiles lining the street.

The shocking change these photos of the filming confirm is that NETFLIX appears to be setting this movie in 1955 the year The Magician’s Nephew was published instead of 1900 when the book took place (Lewis, 1955). In a previous article I explored the broad thematic shifts that changing the setting reinterprets the themes of the book, but this pivotal sequence demonstrates a concrete detail that changes everything. There are no horse-drawn Hansom cabs in the 1950’s because the last Hansom cab license in the U.K. was relinquished in 1947 (Drozdz, 1990). In the time period of this film the black Austin FX3 taxi cab would have been used for transportation instead of horse-drawn carriages (Dimmock, n.d.). Does this mean that in the 1950’s Cabby Frank will be a London taxi cab driver behind a steering wheel instead of the reigns of a horse? If Frank is driving an automobile then where does the horse Strawberry come from?

To visualize how absurd this film location feels against the scene C.S. Lewis described just picture what a horse-drawn 1955 Hansom Austin FX3 taxi cab might look like.

Picture by: Open AI DALL·E through the GPT-4o system.

If you think of the scene which C.S. Lewis described and Pauline Baynes illustrated, it is key that something crashes into a lamppost causing it to break. When Jadis surfed the streets of London atop the Hansom cab’s roof the vehicle collided to wreck the lamppost, but in the leaked footage Jadis rides horseback with nothing being pulled behind. What do you think would happen if a horse and rider were to charge into a cast iron lamppost? That sounds more like a recipe for a broken head than a broken lamppost. Since this is set in the 1950’s any lamppost shards brought into Narnia would presumably be for an electric streetlight instead of a gas powered lamppost. Although it may not seem like much, that single minor detail will send ripple waves cascading a change in symbolic meaning to future Narnia sequels as will be explored in our next article.

Of course it is possible that this stunt sequence intends to digitally insert the Hansom cab behind the horse using modern movie magic. Since the camera is seen chasing the horse from the side on a motorcycle it could be assumed that anything being pulled by the horse didn’t need to be seen from that particular angle and was left out of the shot. The Hansom cab wasn’t the only thing left out of the shot. Where’s Uncle Andrew? Why is Digory riding in front of the horse and how did he get wrapped up in Jadis’s rampage of terror? In the book Digory and Polly try to stop Jadis and expel her out of our world, but the imagery of Digory taking the reigns of the horse implies something different is happening here. Have new events forced enemies to work together or has Digory been kidnapped by Jadis? The unique staging differs from anything in the book and whispers of a new narrative reinvention. Where is Polly? We might need to wait until next year to find out how all the character threads converge in one of the story’s most transformational moments.

Before you watch the clip at the bottom of the article it is important to dissect the still image below.

The characters in this scene can easily be identified as Digory, Jadis, and the horse Strawberry. Digory can be recognized because his costume matches the clothing he was seen in from previous location shooting photos. The horse matches the color and description of the Cabby’s horse Strawberry (Lewis, 1955). Jadis stands out for her alien clothing that invokes the unique properties of metals from a more advanced world while fractal shards of silver subtly foreshadow the White Witch’s reign of ice (Lewis, 1950a; Lewis, 1955). Since this was a stunt performance using stunt doubles it must be understood that these aren’t the real costumes, but substitutes only meant to be seen from a distance. If you look carefully in this photograph you can see safety equipment concealed into the costume. Both stunt doubles for Digory and Jadis are wearing helmets underneath their wigs and Jadis’s costume even seems like it came with elbowpads from an alien planet. Despite the crude quality, the stunt costume can still give us an idea of the intended look of the costume design. The flowing nature of the metals on Jadis’s dress invoke the flowing robes of Charn nobility described in the book, but also feel like they could be chain mail from a warrior queen (Lewis, 1955). Silvery colors and diamond patterns hint at the image of snow crystals in Jadis’s future (Lewis, 1950), but also bring to mind the chrome of flying saucers. The character does in fact come from another world, but we might be seeing a science fiction re-imagining of Charn that aligns with the popular media of the 1950’s. In this new setting Digory and Poly might grow up with campy film serials about outer space and envision themselves entering Charn as explorers on a new planet. The costume clues from Jadis’s dress might even imply parts of the costume that glow from her magic or technology. Since Charn is a dying world far older than ours (Lewis, 1955), it could be re-imagined as a technologically advanced alien civilization. This science fiction interpretation of Charn never would fly in the book’s original 1900 setting, but the 1950’s was the era of Sputnik (HISTORY.com Editors, 2025). Perhaps in this era children envisioned portals to far off worlds through the perspective of Buck Rogers. The fourth Indiana Jones movie was widely misunderstood and rejected by audiences for adapting to B-roll Sci-Fi film tropes when the movie shifted to the 1950’s setting (Speilberg, 2008). Could The Magician’s Nephew blaze new ground in a Sci-Fi production design of Charn or would Narnia Fans reject it just like Indiana Jones And The Saucer Men From Mars (Sciretta, 2008). With today’s technology we can use the assistance of AI generated imagery to visualize some potential interpretations of what Jadis’s stunt double was seen wearing.

Picture by: XAI Grok through the Grok 4 system.

Finally a character poster of Emma Mackey as Jadis was generated based on what her stunt double was seen wearing.

Picture by: Open AI DALL·E through the Bing Chat system, edited with OpenArt, and revised in Adobe Photoshop

How do all these pieces fit together? What do you think about the implications of a modernized 195o’s setting without any Hansom cabs? Does the look of Jadis from Emma Mackey’s stunt double match the way you imagined the character? Watch the footage for yourself and let us know.

Download Video