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Ccasting has come a long way since the early 1980s when it was acceptable to sign Max von Sydow to play Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon in 1980, or to hire Peter Ustinov to star in Charlie Chan and The Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981 (although there were protests at the time). These days, filmmakers have to protect all the white in the medieval tale, which seems to be what happened this week to The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’s Andy Serkis.
He was interviewed by the BBC As for why every major character in the new film has been a white actor, Serkis seemed to blame it on his writing. “Tolkien himself was very influenced by Norse mythology, there are many ideas,” he said. “The Shire feel very holy, you know… They’re not too concerned about what’s going on beyond the Shire’s borders, but they know they don’t want people coming.
“Yes, there have been criticisms,” Serkis added. “This film acknowledges that. But I don’t think we’re going to be making the film politically correct just because it’s singing and putting the boxes. So, it’s important.”
This, it must be said, feels like dragging Tolkien into the evidence box to try to solve a problem that pipe-smoking Oxford would never have had in his time. In the 1940s, Britain was very different from what it is today, and the fact that one day anyone would argue that the fictional races of the countries people imagined should look like white people from northern Europe would not have occurred to anyone. The author, for his part, was probably too busy deciding exactly how the Elvish verbs should be conjugated and drawing a list of each type in the Shire to look forward to. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth explaining why Serkis’ defense feels so uncertain.
For one thing, The Hunt for Gollum is not edited in a vacuum. The new film, which focuses on the inhabitants of Middle-earth with less hygiene, is closely associated with Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy from the turn of the century. Its visual language was established more than twenty years ago when the concept of black elves or Lenny Henry is playing the hobbit they would feel more mature than they do now. If Serkis had simply said that he was maintaining continuity with the films, which took great liberties with the source material, that would have been a mutual defense. Invoking Tolkien instead makes it sound like the Oxford philosopher who died in 1973 himself signed the paper to 2026.
This does not deny that the author of The The Lord of the Rings composed of Middle-earth (or the northwestern region that appears most in literature) as a place whose geography is closely related to Europe. He explained that Hobbiton lay near Oxford, and Minas Tirith near Florence or Ravenna. Brown-skinned people mostly lived in the south, while people in the east looked more diverse.
Yet this is where the game begins to make sense to anyone who wants to turn Tolkien into a modern ethnographer. If we adhere to the rule that every description in books should be reproduced on screen, Jackson’s movies should not be made by ordinary people. The Númenóreans, from whom Aragorn is descended, are described as a race of mighty giants, often reaching seven meters in height. Asking if they would have looked like modern Europeans feels like asking if centaurs should have looked like Berkshire people.
As for the elves, they are immortal, they can walk on snow without leaving a mark, and they can see long distances – and this is before we even get into the lembas bread. Their civilizations have more wisdom than people know. Why exactly is a difficult question if one of them would be actor Ismael Cruz Cordova?
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has taken a different approach. Struggling to find someone to play the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy, Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o. The film also has many British and US actors speaking modern English with mostly American accents, which obviously wasn’t exactly how it went down in Greece. The beginning features one-eyed giants, a six-headed sea monster and female birds that sing sailors to death. But again, the problem is obviously the casting of the person of color.
Perhaps if there is any lesson to be learned from the latest culture war, it is that every change is interpretation. Jackson happily recreated Tolkien’s era, Nolan’s co-stars don’t speak Homeric Greek, and nobody knows Viggo Mortensen is only 5ft 11in. Each director decides which parts of the source to keep, which to change and which to quietly ignore. On this basis, Serkis is free to choose what he has created. To say that Tolkien invented them is an understatement.
