Director of Lord of the Rings spinoff explains all-white cast

Bookmarks featuring characters from The Lord of the Rings films. Photo: Wikipedia

Andy Serkis, director of The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, has found himself at the center of a cultural debate after explaining why the entire cast of the new film is white, the BBC reports.

Serkis, best known for playing Gollum in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, is directing a feature-length film for the first time. The movie is conceived as an “interquel” – it will depict events described by Tolkien but not shown in Jackson’s films. Elijah Wood will return as Frodo and Ian McKellen as Gandalf, while Jamie Dornan has been cast as Aragorn.

Commenting on the cast, Serkis said Middle-earth appears to be a “very, very white” place and noted that Tolkien himself was heavily influenced by Norse mythology.

The director stressed that he did not intend to create a “politically correct version of the film” in which actors were chosen merely to meet formal diversity requirements.

The British newspaper The Guardian criticized his position, arguing that invoking Tolkien created the impression that the Oxford philologist, who died in 1973, had personally approved the cast of a 2026 film. Some commentators also argued that Middle-earth’s geography, modeled on Europe, did not rule out the presence of Black characters.

As the UOJ reported, claims that Tolkien’s book is racist have previously been voiced in British academic circles. Debates surrounding the work of the English writer, a devout Catholic who incorporated Christian themes into his books, periodically resurface in Western media amid disputes over cultural diversity in the film industry.

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