Casting has come a long way since the early 1980s when it was somehow still acceptable to sign up Max von Sydow to play Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon in 1980, or hire Peter Ustinov as the lead in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981 (despite protests at the time). These days, film-makers will have to defend an all-white cast in a medieval fantasy flick, which appears to be what has happened this week to The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’s Andy Serkis.
Asked by the BBC why every major casting for the new film has been a white actor, Serkis appeared to lay the blame on his literary source material. “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling,” he said. “The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know … They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of the Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in.
“Yes, there have been criticisms,” Serkis added. “This particular film is somewhat acknowledging that. But I don’t think we will be doing a politically correct just-casting-for-the sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version of the film. So, it’s where relevant basically.”
This does, it must be said, feel a bit like dragging Tolkien into the witness box to try to solve a problem that the pipe-smoking Oxford don could never have conceived of in his own time. Britain in the 1940s was less ethnically diverse than it is now, and the idea that anyone might one day debate whether fantasy races from an imagined world should look almost exclusively like white people from northern Europe would not really have occurred to anyone. The author, for his part, was probably far too busy deciding exactly how Elvish verbs should conjugate and mapping the genealogy of every hobbit in the Shire to be looking so far ahead. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth pinning down exactly why Serkis’s defence feels so unconvincing.
For one thing, The Hunt for Gollum is not being adapted in a vacuum. The new film, by dint of its focus on Middle-earth’s least hygienic resident, is firmly tied to Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy from the turn of the century. Its visual grammar was established more than two decades ago when the idea of black elves or Lenny Henry playing a hobbit would have felt considerably more radical than they do now. If Serkis had simply said that he was preserving continuity with those films, which themselves took huge liberties with the source material, that would at least have been a coherent defence. Invoking Tolkien instead makes it sound as though an Oxford philologist who died in 1973 personally signed off the 2026 casting sheet.
This is not to deny that the author of The Lord of the Rings conceived of Middle-earth (or at least the north-western portion that features most prominently in the novels) as a place whose geography broadly aligns with Europe. He described Hobbiton as lying roughly at the latitude of Oxford, with Minas Tirith closer to Florence or Ravenna. Brown-skinned peoples generally inhabited the south, while people in the east had a variety of appearances.
Yet this is also where the exercise starts to unravel for anyone determined to turn Tolkien into a modern ethnographer. If we’re sticking rigidly to the rule that every physical description in the books must be reproduced on screen, Jackson’s films shouldn’t have been made with ordinary human actors in the first place. The Númenóreans, from whom Aragorn descends, are described as a race of near-superhuman giants, often approaching seven feet tall. Asking whether they should have looked like modern Europeans feels rather like asking whether centaurs ought to resemble people from Berkshire.
As for the elves, they are immortal, can walk on snow while barely leaving a mark, and see for miles – and this is before we even get into lembas bread. Their civilisations possess more wisdom than any known to humankind. Why exactly is the pressing question whether one of them could be played by Ismael Cruz Córdova?
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has taken a different approach. Challenged with finding someone to play the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy, Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o. The film also boasts a cast of mostly British and US actors speaking modern English largely in American accents, which is arguably not exactly how it went down in iron age Greece. The source material features one-eyed giants, a six-headed sea monster and bird-women who sing sailors to their deaths. But again, the problem is apparently with the casting of a person of colour.
Perhaps if there’s any lesson to be learned from this latest culture-war skirmish, it’s that every adaptation is an act of interpretation. Jackson happily rearranged Tolkien’s timelines, Nolan’s cast won’t be speaking Homeric Greek, and nobody much minds that Viggo Mortensen is only 5ft 11in. Every director decides which parts of the source material to preserve, which to modernise and which to quietly ignore. On this basis, Serkis is perfectly entitled to make the casting choices he has made. Claiming that Tolkien made them for him is more of a stretch.
