This year marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of The Chronicles of Narniathe fantasy saga that delighted millions of viewers and continues to be one of the most watched titles of new generations on the Disney+ platform. To celebrate the anniversary, Georgie Henley – who played Lucy Pevensie – shared a photo gallery on her social media Skandar Keynes, Anna Popplewell and William Moseley. The image represents a postcard taken during the original filming and shows how the passage of time has changed those who gave life to the Pevensie brothers.
“20 years! We had to recreate this photo in August when Andrew was in London. I really don’t have any words other than “Thank you, Andrew, for creating real magic and letting us be a part of it, and thank you to everyone for loving the film as much as we loved making it.” “I’ll be posting a few more photos of our Narnia family soon, how lucky we are!” the actress wrote at the end of the post.
Fans of the saga quickly shared the images and noticed that one of the four famous brothers of Narnia has no social networks and seems to have disappeared from the public eye. This is Skandar Keynes, who took a completely different path.
Skandar Amin Casper Keynes (34) went from being one of Disney’s most promising young characters to disappearing from the media radar. The young man started acting at a young age. When he was 12 years old, a casting agent saw him in one of his performances and thought his expression and presence were a perfect fit for Edmund.
Although he was only slightly involved in a production Macbeth The fantastic saga, which he received from the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001, catapulted him to international fame. However, His education was always a priority for his family.. He attended the Anna Scher Theater School until 2005 and then entered the prestigious City of London School, the same institution that welcomed Daniel Radcliffe during the years he was filming Harry Potter. This routine away from the constant stress was key to allowing him to thrive with some normality.
In an interview with Cinema mix In 2010, Keynes stated that unlike the protagonists of Harry PotterHe spent most of his life away from the sets. “People only associate me with Edmund, but I worked for a year and a half in total. The rest of the time I had a normal life.”he emphasized. He also stated that he never faced the media harassment that other young actors experienced as he was able to walk quietly without fans chasing him or photographers standing at the door of his house.
This balance influenced his decision to retire after producing The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. At 19, he decided to focus on a vocation that had nothing to do with cinema at all and was linked to Middle Eastern studies.. So he went to Cambridge University, where he obtained a double degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Pembroke College, specializing in Arabic and Persian.
The reason why he chose this branch of politics is his family heritage. His mother is Lebanese and although the actor traveled to Lebanon every year, he did not speak the language. This desire to understand his roots led him to delve deeper into the region’s language, culture and politics. In dialogue with Business Insiderassured that academic studies had awakened a passion that pushed out any possibility of continuing his acting career: “I had found an area that I was passionate about. I couldn’t justify putting off this opportunity.“.
As part of his training, he lived in Beirut for a year to perfect his colloquial Arabic and wrote a thesis comparing history teaching in Iran and Saudi Arabia. He also studied Persian with the aim of broadening his perspective on the cultural dynamics of the Middle East.
Another little-known reason that led him to take this path is that the interpreter is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, great-nephew of the economist John Maynard Keynes and a descendant of academics associated with Cambridge and Middle Eastern studies. In addition, he is the grandson of the Lebanese writer and diplomat Cecil Hourani on his mother’s side.
Since 2015 he has been working on public affairs related to the region. He initially worked as a parliamentary advisor in the British House of Commons, where he accompanied MPs on diplomatic missions to the Middle East and North Africa. He has been working as a political advisor to the British government since 2017.
Due to his new life, which was connected with global political affairs, the actor was favored during these years Keep your profile away from TV cameras and don’t even have social networks. For this reason, the photos that her castmate published last week surprised all her fans by noting the physical changes that she has experienced in these 20 years.
In one of his last interviews, when asked about the possibility of returning to acting at some point, he said: “I hope that everything I do is related to my studies so that I don’t waste four years of my life. Not many employers seem to be actively interested in Middle Eastern studies students, probably because there are so few of us.”
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