Conservative audiences have been burned enough times by Hollywood to know better, yet the temptation to celebrate a rare moment of pushback never quite fades. That temptation is being tested again by a director prepping a major new chapter in one of the most beloved fantasy sagas ever brought to screen. You can imagine my shock to hear of a Hollywood director openly resisting casting pressure from woke activists. Well, the excitement didn’t last long.
Andy Serkis, the actor-turned-director behind the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, revealed in an interview with the BBC that he's not planning to cast the film with diverse actors for diversity's sake. Serkis argues that diversity should be added only “where relevant,” rather than to satisfy Hollywood's box-ticking obsession.
That's about as close to common sense as Hollywood gets these days.
Refreshing, right? The original Lord of the Rings trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson, has spent two decades being criticized for being “too white.” Some critics even claim the films used racial coding that linked heroic characters to whiteness and villains to dark-skinned tropes.
But Serkis argued that J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth draws heavily from Norse mythology, and he's using that fact to justify a cast that will remain largely white, which makes sense. Christopher Nolan should have taken that advice when he was casting for The Odyssey.
But I digress.
As you know, diversity for the sake of diversity has become Hollywood's favorite parlor trick. HBO's new Harry Potter series cast a black actor as Professor Snape, a flat departure from the source novels. Disney has built an entire cottage industry out of it: a brown actress cast as Snow White, a black actress cast as Ariel the mermaid, an interracial Jim Dear and Darling in Lady and the Tramp, and a black actress as the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio are key examples on their wall of shame.
So on paper, Serkis sounds like the rare Hollywood figure willing to resist the trend. Except he isn't rejecting wokeness at all. He's just found a more creative way to smuggle it in.
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Rather than simply admitting that mostly white hobbits populate the Shire because that's how Tolkien wrote it, Serkis decided the Shire needed a diagnosis. "The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know…" Serkis said. "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," he said.
Translation: The Shire is xenophobic. And xenophobic, in Serkis's framing, is just another word for white.
So, congratulations, Tolkien fans, you’re getting another Lord of the Rings movie you probably didn’t want. Sure, there will be no forced diversity, but at least it will find another way to insult white people.
