Hobbit Casting Agent Fired For Dismissing Non-White Hobbits

[Squarez]

NOTE FOR IDIOTS:

If they were looking for caucasian people it would be in the advert. In the same way no-ones complaining because they're being discriminated for being too tall. ITS IN THE ADVERT.

If I was to try an cast a movie about China or something and I wrote down in the audition ad "looking for people of asian decent, preferably Chinese" that would be fine.

But you can't turn people away at the audition itself if they fill all the criteria just because they have the wrong skin colour. It's not on.

Note: I don't believe it's actually mentioned what skin colour hobbits are. For all I know Samwise could be black.

 

[GiantRedButton]

Thats kinda stupid o. O
Even if they don't give a shit about the book, everyone who watched Lotr still knows the skin colour of the Tooks.
Funny thing though. If a white guy would play a character that is meant to be black they would immediatly be accused of white washing , but this is apparently ok.

exactly, and when did Tolkien mention that hobbits were of varying skin color? now, he didnt exactly mention that they were all white, either, but it will raise some questions when Bilbo's cousin turns out to be black, if you get my meaning

Yeah, I don't think changing the canon to make bilbo a bastard child would be a good idea.

 

[Person342]

I think the persian royalty weren't actually asian but eastern european...might have that wrong but i swear that i heard it somewhere. So in the case of prince of persia a white prince would make sense. Though they were also probably eastern european if im right.

 

[Capslockbroken]

Hi, I'm a member of two racial minorities, and you are wrong. Almost everyone who complained about this took pains to demonstrate that they were applying a single standard- "I couldn't play Martin Luther King" for example. If the PC culture had an argument flowchart, every single box would have an arrow pointing at [Allege Racism]. I wonder if they ever considered that indiscriminate accusations of bigotry may be just as harmful to human beings as bigotry is.

 

[ugeine]

Hobbits, based off middle Yorkshire like areas of England with a touch of Scots (The Tooks), Medieval Europe setting. Now I don't know about you but I wouldn't imagine very many black or Asian hobbits walking around particularly as they rarely leave the Shire and therefore not able to evolve into being the Asian/black versions like we humans have.

I used to live in Yorkshire, and I can tell you for a fact that the people aren't about 3"6 with large, leathery feet covered in hair. They don't have pointed ears, either.

And you won't meet a single person who lives in a hole, either. You will meet a few people of Caribbean, African or Asian descent, however.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information about Yorkshire, or Middle Earth, but you can't draw any connections between the two.

 

[Eatbrainz]

I think because The Hobbit is set in a medieval age then it would probably make more sense for the hobbits to be light-skinned.

 

[Buccura]

Please excuse my possibly immature response to this but

FFS

 

[Grufflenark]

Its not racist because all hobbits ARE white.

 

[kouriichi]

All the little Hobbits of the Shire were white. :/
Its common knowledge for any Tolkin fan. Im black. I see nothing wrong with them only casting white people as hobbits.

The only reason why the men can be darkskinned is because most of them are out working all day, so it makes sense many of them would have a darker skin tone or tan.

 

[Credge]

The title of the article reads:

Hobbit Casting Agent Fired For Dismissing Non-White Hobbits

The very next sentence says:

A casting director for The Hobbit independently decided that the women of Middle Earth are all Caucasian. The individual has since been fired.

Which is it?

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

Films reflect the society in which they're made, no matter what they're based on. Don't the fans have more to annoy them than a few "ethnic" hobbits?

Damn, practically every famous "human" Disney hero ever made is 100% white cornbread American (Aladdin, John Smith, Hercules, etc) whereas their antagonists are almost uniformly of "ethnic minority". (I'd love to meet the soulless Disney beancounter-turned-creative who thought to himself: "Hey, we need a way to make Scar obviously different to the other lions. I got it! Let's give him a darker coat and a British accent!" And then shake him by the neck until his teeth fall out.)

And nobody seems to have a problem with this (presumably because Jeremy Irons is pure distilled awesome, and the list of Disney Villains he's played has kept him working for years when other, better roles were hard to come by.) But the moment you mention brown-skinned hobbits, everybody goes NUTS!!!

What next, black people, not playing slaves, in a Jane Austen adaptation? THE HORROR!

**(I should add a strong "sarcasm warning" to this post, on account of a lot of extremely thick people will inevitably misinterprit it and accuse me of being a vile minority-hating Nazi; something that seems to happen with monotonous regularity these days. If you were thinking about "calling me out", withdraw your bows, uncock your pistols, and consider yourself suitably chastised.)

 

[MintyNinja]

Anyone else think that this casting director may have gotten on someones nerves at one point and at the first sign of complaint they jumped to fire them? You know, like workplace politics? The only reason we're hearing the race angle is because that's how it's being reported.

 

[RandV80]

I'm not sure if I understand this at face value. It does seems like a normal reaction: "OMG they were slightly racist we'd better fire them to cover our asses!"... but the acting industry is about the only place where all sorts of discrimination is not only expected but required. There's no cruel or racist intent behind it, just they have their type cast and look for very specific things in their roles, ranging from gender, height, weight, skin colour, hair length & colour, looks, boob size, etc etc.

So basically what I'm getting at is in an industry where it's ok to specify that you want to hire say a tall young blonde woman with big boobs, the producers would fire a casting director for being racially insenstive or whatever. In fact probably the only reason this made news was because they got fired in the first place. Sure someone's feelings may have gotten hurt, but considering this was probably an open casting call I doubt that person was even an actor to begin with.

 

[geldonyetich]

That's is a tricky thing, to decide if political correctness is more important than accurately representing Tolkien's vision. It would feel sort of cheap to see hobbits of varying skin tone simply because they're trying to be PC. Like seeing a kid's special that goes out of the way to be multiethnic.

However, it's tricky to determine if it really was Tolkien's vision really was that the hobbits were white: did he mention the color of their skin even once? Granted, whatever it is, it should probably be the same. This is because we're assuming this takes place in an age where people aren't highly migratory due to medieval travel restrictions, and so it's safe to assume a community will be of roughly the same ethnicity.

 

[RoBi3.0]

Just like the period in real earth history that Lotr mimics. Due to transportation restraints large geographical regions remained isolated. Centuries of geographical isolation leads to people looking all the same. This is even more so in the case of hobbit of the Shire since cultural beliefs lead Shire Hobbits into an even more extreme form of self isolation. This wasn't an effort by Tolkien to be racist, but was instead an effort to insert realism.

It should also be understood that the region of Middle-earth that The Hobbit and LotR focus on is a relatively small portion of Middle-earth. Men from the south (south of Mordor) were described as dark or dark skinned, I believe, so it is not like people of color didn't exist at all. It is However very unlikely that they would have mingled with hobbit often enough to breed, and even more unlikely that if such a thing did occur that the offspring of such a union would be hanging out in the Shire. Bilbo took a "vacation" outside of the Shire for several months and look how they treated him. It was stated many times that the only reason that he remained is decent standing around the hobbit community was because of his wealth. I can't imagine how a "off" looking hobbit would be treated. Hell Hobbits from Buckland often looked down on by Shire Hobbits for the simple fact that the could swim and often mingled with Humans. So again I can't imagine how a "off" looking hobbit would be treated.

And too the guy that brought up Prince of Persia. That movie was based on a video game not a world that was handcrafted by one man over the course of his life time. A world that has thousand and thousands of pages of published source material to pull from. Note that the majority of Tolkien's manuscripts concerning Middle-earth have not be published. So if Tolkien wrote something that was published that is the way it was meant be. The least they could do is honor Tolkien's life work by not making stupid mistakes on purpose in order to be PC.

 

[Gingerman]

Hobbits, based off middle Yorkshire like areas of England with a touch of Scots (The Tooks), Medieval Europe setting. Now I don't know about you but I wouldn't imagine very many black or Asian hobbits walking around particularly as they rarely leave the Shire and therefore not able to evolve into being the Asian/black versions like we humans have.

I used to live in Yorkshire, and I can tell you for a fact that the people aren't about 3"6 with large, leathery feet covered in hair. They don't have pointed ears, either.

And you won't meet a single person who lives in a hole, either. You will meet a few people of Caribbean, African or Asian descent, however.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information about Yorkshire, or Middle Earth, but you can't draw any connections between the two.

I'll say again in case I was to fast for you.

Based off Yorkshire like area, not Yorkshire itself. For example Dwarfs in some fantasy settings are loosely based off of the Scottish stereotype, loud arrogant, drunkards but rather good fighters.

Now not all Scots are 5ft tall and clad in chain mail because you see these kinds of dwarfs are BASED off a stereotype just as the Shire and its peoples are based around the Yorkshire area in England there is a difference.

I'm sorry for coming off as rather insulting here but I'm tired of people trying to bastardise classic stories and novels. You don't exactly have a white man to play a African tribes man set in the 1700 do you?

Just like in the EarthSea books the main characters are black and therefore should be played by black actors and not whites.

 

[NezumiiroKitsune]

Her argument is can be applied to any kind of aesthetic / anatomical factor, including height, by which the argument would go ""It's 2010 and I still can't believe I'm being discriminated against because I'm over 6ft". It is how Hobbits were created; geologically they're white because Middle Earth is Europe, or the Arda equivalent. This isn't racism, and nor should it be treated as such. I feel for the women having the wait in line, but she should have researched the role some or at least considered the qualities they were looking for before joining the queue. Despite this however, I can understand why she's pissed off, but the casting agent shouldn't have been fired.

There is a wider variation of ethnicity in Middle Earth by the way, you'd have to look further East of Arda, but not much about it was written. Tolkien's works are heavily focused on a small part of Arda, with the Simarillion as an exception.

 

[RichardThompson]

I'm almost sure the Hobbits were based on traditional Irish and British communities... quite frankly I dont think there were that many Asians knocking around back that but I don't particularly see an issue with it, except for the logistics of it ie. the entire area of middle earth seems to have a climate relatively similar to us in Ireland, and we've never evolved beyond this skin tone.