Skandar’s Scare in Beirut

From the New Yorker: In “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London during the Blitz and sent to stay with an elderly professor in a house in the countryside. Last Wednesday evening, in an old Ottoman villa in West Beirut, Skandar Keynes, the fourteen-year-old actor who played Edmund Pevensie in last year’s film of “Narnia,” his mother, Zelfa, and his grandfather, Cecil Hourani, were packing their things and getting ready to evacuate. Two days before the Israeli attacks on Hezbollah began, on July 12th, they had arrived from Britain for their annual summer holiday in Lebanon, and had found themselves stranded there along with thousands of other foreign tourists. They had, in fact, been about to leave Beirut for the Hourani ancestral home in the ancient town of Marjeyoun, near the frontier with Israel. Marjeyoun is very close to the current fighting, and before being taken over by Hezbollah it had been the longtime headquarters of the Christian militia. Except for 2004, when Skandar was filming “Narnia” and the family decamped with him to the set in New Zealand, he has spent every summer of his life there. Read the whole story here.