Enid Blyton wrote over 700 children’s books. Many remain worldwide bestsellers: one is still bought every two minutes in the UK alone.
But The Magic Faraway Tree, her fantastical series about a family who move to the countryside to discover an enchanted tree brimming with odd characters and revolving lands – holds such a sacred place in many adults’ hearts that, nearly 90 years after it was first published, no one’s dared to make a movie of it, until now.
‘When I’d say I was adapting the Faraway Tree, a few people would go ‘Don’t!’’ confesses Bafta-winning screenwriter Simon Farnaby (Paddington 2, Wonka), speaking on the phone from the set of Ghosts: The Movie, where he is standing in the make-up trailer without his trousers (Ghosts fans will understand).
‘They would say “Please don’t set it in the future: i.e. “now” where there’s mobile phones and iPads and stuff, because that would just ruin it! And I was like ‘Oh well, that’s exactly what I plan to do.’
But diehard Blyton fans can breathe easy. Whilst the film’s action is updated to the ‘now’ of 2026, with relatable kids like moody feminist teenager Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) and a screen-addicted Jo (Phoenix Laroche), the overall vibe is wholesome and timeless.
‘I wanted that sort of clash between modern kids with this slightly old-fashioned world.’ Farnaby explains ‘For me, there’s humour in that.’ He’s right. As you’d expect, his movie is laugh-out-loud funny.
As well as an all-star cast of national treasures like Jennifer Saunders, Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beele and Lenny Henry, The Magic Faraway Tree features Rebecca Ferguson as baddie Dame Snap, Andrew Garfield as the children’s screen-banning father, alongside favourite TV faces like Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning (as Dame Washalot), Friday Night Dinner’s Mark Heap and Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan, who tells us she couldn’t wait to clamber back in another corset to play Silky the Fairy.
‘It’s a real joy to play a character that enjoys life so much!’ the former Derry Girl enthuses, when we catch up with her and co-star Claire Foy (who plays the children’s mother) in a London hotel, ‘Silky just doesn’t have any self-doubt and really thinks everything is brilliant! Sometimes when you do roles in harder things you can end the day going ‘oof!’ Whereas this project was so life-affirming and lovely, because it was about rediscovering that joy of childhood, seeing the best in everyone and what discovery and adventure feels like.’
Plus, she got elf ears. ‘I grew them myself! I’m very method like that,’ Coughlan jokes proudly, wiggling her feet in her ‘killer’, be-feathered Louboutin heels. ‘Not really, but they did look weirdly real – until they came off, when they looked like tiny pieces of ham. It was quite sad. I sort of loved having them and my wig.
‘That was by Emma Rigby, the genius who does the Queen’s wigs on Bridgerton. So much hair! No human could ever grow that much hair.’
As is traditional in children’s stories, the parents get left behind while their kids scamper off on adventures, which meant Claire Foy spent most of the shoot in dungarees stuck back at home.
‘If we get to do number two – mum is getting up that tree!’ she laughs. But The Crown actress still insists making the movie was ‘honestly one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done’. And though medical issues mean Foy avoids sugar and gluten, she still raided the prop table for The Land Of Goodies, which features outsized, entirely edible versions of favourite sweets like Gummy Bears, candy necklaces and flying saucers.
‘I stole so much!’ she admits. ‘I’ve still got a giant jelly strawberry and giant cherries in my drawer in the kitchen. I think they’ll last until the end of time.’
A parent herself, to a 10-year-old daughter, Foy appreciates the movie’s message – that families should put down their screens and reconnect with nature, but that limiting screen time is easier said than done. ‘We think that we have free will and we don’t. And it’s very hard to exercise it.
‘It is something that I really, really firmly believe that should be legislated – like cigarettes and alcohol. You need people to put restrictions on it and not parent shame, because that doesn’t do anyone any good.’
‘I think AI feels very overwhelming and omnipresent and quite depressing at the moment,’ chimes in Coughlan, who points out that, as an antidote to all that, the escapism of The Magic Faraway Tree movie is rooted in practical effects created by ‘brilliant crafts people’: beautiful sets (including building the tree itself with its iconic slippery slip slide), amazing wigs and showstopping costumes so that the movie ‘doesn’t feel too shiny. You feel it feels homemade in a really gorgeous way.’
A highlight was walking into Moonface’s house because ‘it wasn’t created on green screen. You could lift and play with everything.’
Moonface, the self-appointed leader of the Faraway folk, is played by 6ft 6 tall Nonso Anozie, who stood 7ft in his huge, white crescent-shaped wig that (as purists will argue) makes him ‘Moon hair’ not ‘Moonface’. As the Sweet Tooth actor later reveals to us over the phone, ‘We did go down the line of looking at a prosthetic flat, circular face, but we decided that might be a bit scary.’ So now you know.
Growing up in a council block in North London, Nonso didn’t exactly have an ‘Enid Blyton childhood’ himself, but was still transported by the soul of the story and is fascinated by why it endures.
‘There’s something magic that I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like in summer when you go to Parliament Hill [in North London] and you walk down into the long, thick brush and you see that golden heat haze and the pollen from the “wishes” – you know the dandelion flowers. There’s something uniquely English about that which is captured in the book and now the film’.
And we could all certainly do with a dusting of magic right now. Which, as Claire Foy points out, was the same for Blyton’s first readers back in 1939.
‘Yes, it’s a sort of dream of muddy knees, climbing trees, jam tarts, that sort of thing, but as she was writing these books, World War Two was looming’.
Thankfully, Simon Farnaby is already working on ideas for a sequel, ‘or maybe two’, depending on The Magic Faraway Tree’s box office success. It’s surely guaranteed. With all that’s going on in the world right now, there’s never been a better time to clamber back up the Faraway Tree.
The Magic Faraway Tree is out in UK cinemas from March 27.
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