Andy Serkis, who will direct and once again star as Gollum in the upcoming Lord of the Rings spinoff film, The Hunt For Gollum, insists that the new project won’t push for woke casting to quiet complaints about “diversity,” but will try to address the issue “where relevant.”
Woke critics have attacked the 90-year-old stories for being “too white,” and in an interview with the BBC, Serkis admits that the series of books and films have been accused of lacking “diversity.” according to Deadline.
Serkis noted that the creator of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings universe, James R.R. Tolkein, did not concern himself with racial or cultural differences outside the experience of the British Isles.
“Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology; there’s a lot of that feeling,” Serkis said. “The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know.” And added, “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.”
But he admitted that there “have been criticisms” of Tolkien’s tales, and he promised that his new film, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum, will address the question of “diversity.”
“This particular film is somewhat acknowledging that. But we 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 only where relevant basically,” he said.
Serkis is right. Tolkien, the father of the Rings universe, specifically created his rich and comprehensive literary world as a way to provide the British people with a group of “ancient history” tales because he felt that England lacked the ancient origin stories that so many other cultures had as part of their ethnicity. He was not at all interested in including Africans, or Asians, or Americans, or any other such group outside the mostly white British identity in his tales. He was not aiming for “diversity” or any other such woke ideas.
Serkis has been embroiled with accusations of wokeness before. After the debut of his last film, Serkis was accused of turning George Orwell’s Animal Farm into a woke mess by altering the moral of the story from a warning about communism to an attack on capitalism. The animated film was also a bomb at the box office.
The screenplay for The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt For Gollum was written for the 2027 Warner Bros. release by long-time Lord of the Rings writer/producer Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. It is also set to bring back some old favorites, including Elijah Wood as Frodo Baggins, and Ian McKellen as Gandalf.
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