Andy Serkis, who directs and plays Gollum in The Hunt for Gollum, was asked by BBC News about criticism that the film’s announced cast is entirely white. He acknowledged the concern and defended the choices by pointing to Tolkien’s Norse mythology inspiration. “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling. The Shire feels very, very much like a very… white, you know,” he said in a BBC News interview covered by The Tab, adding that Shire-folk are “not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of The Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in.” He said the film won’t pursue “a politically correct just-casting-for-the-sake-of-casting-and-ticking-boxes version” and that diversity would be included “only where relevant.”
The cast announced so far includes Kate Winslet, Leo Woodall, Jamie Dornan as Aragorn, Anya Taylor-Joy as the invented Elf Seren, Elijah Wood returning as Frodo, and Ian McKellen back as Gandalf. None of the announced actors is a person of color. The film covers the years between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, with story events ranging across the North, Rivendell, and lands associated with Gondor and the Wilderland.
Andy Serkis at San Diego Comic-Con, July 2017. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Serkis’s Norse mythology argument has real grounding when applied to the Shire specifically. Tolkien modeled Hobbit culture partly after rural English and Norse folk traditions, and his letters confirm the Shire was conceived as a pre-industrial English pastoral. Middle-earth extends well past the Shire, though. Tolkien wrote the Haradrim, the Easterlings, the Variags of Khand, and the coastal peoples of Numenorean lineage as genuinely distinct peoples spread across a varied world. Rivendell, Gondor, and the Wilderland are the film’s primary settings outside the Shire, and Tolkien never described the peoples of those regions in racial terms.
The casting diversity debate in Tolkien adaptations has been running since Amazon’s The Rings of Power cast Black and brown actors in Elvish and Numenorean roles, drawing support from some quarters and significant backlash from others. Critics at the time argued the casting was historically unfaithful to Tolkien; Serkis is now fielding the inverse charge. Hunt for Gollum releases December 17, 2027.
We covered the film’s development and casting announcements on Exploring Tolkien:
