How We Read Rings of Power

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

Just a brief reply to this: I don't think that by casting POC as Elves, Dwarves or Númenóreans the makers of RoP are trying to say anything about the 'actual' ethnic make-up of these communities. They're casting actors to play people, regardless of what colour they're supposed to be. Sadoc Burrows is obviously meant to be a member of the same ethnic group as the other Harfoots (many of which are probably his relatives), never mind that he's played by a black actor and the others aren't. It's no different from an Afro-American or Asian actor playing Hamlet, or Kenneth Branagh casting Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves as brothers in Much Ado About Nothing.

There I would have to disagree. Besides Shakespeare having been staged myriad times over half a millennium and directors therefore trying to outdo each other in bizarre productions so as to be "fresh" (e.g. Branagh's 30s musical Love's Labour's Lost and especially his Mikado-cum-As You Like It), not just his particular Much Ado but also Will's original are really set in a fantastical no-place that happens to use Italian nomenclature, and his mix of skin tones and accents is no more disturbing than the casting of boys as Beatrice and Hero would have been to his original audience.

But establishing a Secondary World requires verisimilitude. If this were as abstracted as an austere 60s Bayreuth production, which demands the viewer to fill in the blanks from next to nothing. it would be one thing, but Amazon have lavished money all over weapons and other props, some armor (not Elendil's), and limitless terabytes of CGI all intended to turn Numenor and Middle-earth into real places.

And if the intention was simply to provide employment opportunities to non-European actors, they could easily have cast all the Southrons as BIPOC, as a coherent ethnic group rather than the multiracial (and multilinguistic) jumble they are.

(I also don't think it was an accident that they cast the notoriously outspoken Lenny Henry as Sadoc, either. I believe fan-baiting was a conscious strategy).