Throughout his career, 62-year-old Serkis has been a campaigner for equality. In 2018, he said that being one of the few white actors in Black Panther gave him a new understanding of what it feels like to be the ethnic minority on a film set.<\/p>\n
However, the previous Lord of the Rings films, made before colour-blind casting became common, had almost entirely white line-ups, and so far, his film looks like being the same.<\/p>\n
Every major cast member announcement to date has been white; Jamie Dornan, Anna Taylor-Joy, Kate Winslet, Leo Woodall, as well as the returning stars including Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellan. The question is, why?<\/p>\n
Serkis nods his head before answering and it is clear this is a subject he has given a lot of thought: “Tolkien himself was influenced a lot by Norse mythology, there’s a lot of that feeling.<\/p>\n
“The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know\u2026”<\/p>\n
He tails off and pauses before continuing, with greater certainty: “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.<\/p>\n
“Yes, there have been criticisms,” he says, acknowledging arguments that are now almost a quarter of a century old.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Although several major stars have been cast in The Hunt For Gollum already, further casting announcements are expected in the coming months. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Throughout his career, 62-year-old Serkis has been a campaigner for equality. In 2018, he said that being one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":690264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-690263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/690264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}