Andy Serkis is directing The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, and when the BBC asked him directly why the announced cast is entirely white, he didn’t reach for the answer most franchise executives give right now. He gave a different one, and it’s already splitting fans who expected the usual hedge.
The cast so far includes Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Winslet, Jamie Dornan, Leo Woodall, and Lee Pace, alongside returning stars Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen. No Black actors have been announced. That’s drawn the same criticism Peter Jackson’s original trilogy weathered for two decades, and it lands at a moment when the rest of the franchise landscape has settled into a predictable script: get asked about diversity, promise more of it, frame any pushback as bigotry. Amazon’s Rings of Power built two full seasons on that script. Magic: The Gathering just reworked its own mechanics to fit someone else’s IP rather than lean on its own. Serkis didn’t run that play.
He pointed instead to Tolkien’s actual source material. “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, a very white, you know,” Serkis told the BBC, adding that hobbits “don’t want people coming in” from beyond their borders. Pressed on it further, he laid out his actual approach to casting the film: it would be handled “only where relevant,” not as a mandate applied to check a box regardless of the story.
That’s a notably different position from the one Serkis has taken publicly elsewhere in his career. He’s spoken before about how working as one of the few white actors on the set of Black Panther gave him a firsthand sense of what it means to be a minority in a production, and he’s been a vocal advocate for diversity across Hollywood generally. None of that stopped him from acknowledging, on the record, that Tolkien’s Shire is built on a specific cultural inheritance and that casting Hunt for Gollum to match it isn’t a failure to be corrected. Whatever you make of Serkis personally, that’s a more honest position than most studios take, and it keeps the film consistent with the world Jackson already put on screen twenty years ago rather than retrofitting it.
The casting isn’t actually the deepest problem with this project. The Hunt for Gollum has no novel behind it. The entire textual foundation is a few paragraphs, Gandalf’s account in The Fellowship of the Ring of how Aragorn tracked and captured Gollum near the Dead Marshes, plus scattered references in the appendices. Warner Bros. is building a full theatrical feature, with Jackson himself producing and a stacked cast, out of source material that amounts to a page or two of backstory. Everything else on screen, the scenes, the dialogue, the incident, has to be invented from nearly nothing.
Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien’s son and literary executor until his death in 2020, spent decades warning about exactly this kind of expansion. In a rare 2012 interview with Le Monde about Jackson’s original trilogy, films that adapted entire novels his father actually wrote, he said: “They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25.” He went further: “Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away.” That was his verdict on a trilogy adapting real, complete novels. The Hunt for Gollum is stretching a handful of sentences into a tentpole because the name on the poster still sells tickets.
Serkis is handling the one part of this project he controls with more honesty than the industry currently rewards. That doesn’t make the project itself anything other than the kind of franchise expansion Christopher Tolkien spent his life warning against.
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NEXT: Reclaiming The Shire Part 13: Vance, the Shire, and the New Right