The Hunt for Gollum has been criticized for its all-white cast. Blaming Tolkien is the wrong answer film

CAsting has come a long way since the early 1980s when it was still somehow acceptable to sign Max von Sydow to play Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon in 1980, or to cast Peter Ustinov in the title role in Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen in 1981 (despite protests at the time). These days, filmmakers would have to defend an all-white cast in a medieval fantasy film, which seems to be what happened this week for Gollum’s The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Andy Serkis.

When asked by the BBC why the new film was casting a white actor in the entire lead cast, Serkis seemed to blame its literary source material. “Tolkien himself was very influenced by Norse mythology, and there’s a lot of that feeling,” he said. “The county seems very white, you know… They’re not too concerned about what’s going on outside the county lines, but they know they don’t want people to come.

Sarkis added: “Yes, there was criticism.” “This movie in particular acknowledges that to some extent. But I don’t think we’re going to do the politically correct version of the movie just for the sake of casting and checkboxes. So, this is basically where it’s at.”

It must be said that this is a bit like dragging Tolkien into the witness box to try to solve a problem that the pipe-smoking Oxford principal of his day could never have imagined. Britain in the 1940s was less racially diverse than it is now, and the idea that one day anyone would discuss whether fictional races from an almost exclusively imagined world such as white people from northern Europe would ever occur to anyone. The author, for his part, was probably too busy deciding how to conjugate elf verbs and mapping the lineage of every hobbit in the Shire to look far into the future. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth pinpointing precisely why Sarkis’s defense is so unconvincing.

For one thing, The Hunt for Gollum wasn’t adapted in a vacuum. With its focus on the less than clean denizens of Middle-earth, the new film is closely linked to Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy from the turn of the century. Its visual grammar was created more than two decades ago when the idea of ​​playing black elves or Lenny Henry playing a hobbit seemed even more extreme than it does now. If Serkis had simply said he was preserving the continuity of those films, which took significant liberties with the source material, that would have at least been a coherent defence. Invoking Tolkien instead makes it seem as if the Oxford philologist who died in 1973 personally signed the selection paper for 2026.

This is not to deny that the author of The Lord of the Rings envisioned Middle-earth (or at least the northwestern part that figures prominently in the novels) as a place whose geography broadly corresponds to Europe. He described Hobbiton as lying roughly at the latitude of Oxford, with Minas Tirith being closer to Florence or Ravenna. Brown-skinned people generally inhabited the South, while people living in the East had diverse appearances.

However, this is also where the practice begins to unravel for anyone determined to turn Tolkien into a modern ethnographer. If we adhere strictly to the rule that every physical description in books must be reproduced on screen, then Jackson’s films should not have been made with ordinary human actors in the first place. The Númenoreans, from whom Aragorn descends, are described as a race of near-superhuman giants, often approaching seven feet tall. Asking whether they should look like modern Europeans seems to be asking whether centaurs should look like people from the Berkshires.

As for elves, they are immortal, can walk on snow without leaving barely a trace, and can see for miles – and that’s even before we get to the lembas. Their civilizations possess more wisdom than any civilization known to humanity. Why exactly is the burning question whether Ismael Cruz Córdova could play one of them?

Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey” took a different approach. After facing the challenge of finding someone to play the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy, Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o. The film also features a cast of mostly British and American actors who speak modern English with a largely American accent, which is arguably not exactly what happened in Iron Age Greece. The source material features one-eyed giants, a six-headed sea monster, and bird-women who sing to sailors to their deaths. But again, the problem seems to be casting a person of color.

Perhaps if there is any lesson to be learned from this latest culture war skirmish, it is that every adaptation is a process of interpretation. Jackson happily rearranged Tolkien’s timelines, Nolan’s crew won’t speak Homeric Greek, and no one cares much that Viggo Mortensen is only 5 feet 11 inches tall. Each director decides which parts of the original material to keep, which to update and which to quietly ignore. On this basis, Serkis is fully entitled to make the casting choices he made. To claim that Tolkien made it for him is an exaggeration.