Two of the stars of the new Amazon Prime prequel of famed author J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga claim that “artistic license” will “reinvigorate” the show with its woke casting of racial minorities.
The Rings of Power co-stars Benjamin Walker and Ismael Cruz Córdova recently told reporters that the The Lord of the Rings prequel is “reinvigorating” Tolkien’s beloved epic.
“We took a reinvestment in the source material,” said actor Benjamin Walker who stars as the elf king, High King Gil-galad. “And that means that we went to his writing and allowed that to inspire whole new avenues for the show.”
“It allowed us for some artistic freedom to dream up some other aspects of Middle Earth that haven’t been seen before,” he added.
For his part, Ismael Cruz Córdova, who plays warrior elf Arondir, was thrilled that this “artistic license” was used to create elves of color.
“There will no longer be a time,” Córdova said, “where you can say there are no elves of color.”
Córdova proudly added, “So, we erased that one. You know? This conversation will never be there. ‘Oh, you’re — no, I’m an elf.’ The next person that comes after me won’t have to talk about this. So, we’re definitely, that’s what it means to me. I always say if you can see it, you can imagine it, you can create it.”
Even as his epic works about the mythical, pre-historic land of Middle Earth was about race in general, with elves, orcs, Dwarves, hobbits, and humans, it focused mostly on Caucasian people because Tolkien envisioned his stories to be a mythology for the British people in particular, not the history of humanity writ large.
But Tolkien’s work has been a target of the woke for decades due to its lack of gay characters and characters of color.
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