Is Amazon Giving Us a Horny Lord of the Rings Series?

Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series has resumed filming in New Zealand and things are, shall we say, heating up. According to ComicBook.com a casting call that caught the attention of LOTR fan site TheOneRing.net is looking for actors comfortable with nudity. The call reads: “Comfortable with Nudity? Up to $500 per day. Use reference NUDE. We need Nude people based in Auckland – age 18 plus, all shapes and sizes (intimacy guidelines will always be followed on set.)” The production also hired an intimacy coordinator, a position usually tasked with overseeing sex scenes.

Now it’s entirely possible that this casting call is a hoax or unrelated to the Amazon show, but Lord of the Rings Twitter is already positively salivating over what this could entail. (And by “Lord of the Rings Twitter” I mean mostly myself.)

Is Amazon trying to capitalize on the success of the extremely horny Game of Thrones by shoving some sex scenes into the notoriously chaste Tolkien saga? If true, Tolkien might have to return from the great beyond faster than Gandalf the White post-Balrog stomping. See, Tolkien was a DIE HARD Catholic (he was the one that converted TS Eliot to Christianity) and rumored asexual. In fact, he viewed the burgeoning “out of control” sexuality of the 20th century as the greatest challenge to humanity’s morality outside of Nazis and fascism.

He even wrote several letters to his sons expounding at length about the painful but necessary chore that is having sex with your wife (ouch to their mom!) and calling sex within a marriage “the great mortification.”

Now, it’s hard to call him an asexual in modern terms because it’s unclear whether his abhorrence of sex stemmed from his deep religious fervor (which was actually still fairly traditional for being an upper middle class conservative British man in that period) or if he used his religion to justify his deep disinterest in sex. Or, as some have hypothesized (and is hinted at in the biopic Tolkien), he used both to repress potential homosexual urges. After all, there are very few women in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that play major roles (Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel), and despite the chaste (and mostly behind the scenes) romance of Arwen and Aragorn, the most intimate and tender relationships happen between the male characters. The two greatest love stories being Frodo and Sam, and Gimli and Legolas. A subtext made even stronger in the film adaptation because the chemistry between Elijah Wood and Sean Astin was so strong.

But basically, the man very purposefully excluded sex from his books so it is hilarious that Amazon might now be taking his pure, chaste fantasy masterpiece and filling it full of dirty, dirty sexy times. There are still questions burning in my mind:

The casting call was looking for a lot of actors of all shapes and sizes, does this mean we will be getting some sort of orc orgy… and orcgy?

Will the hobbits get ringlet merkins to match their lustrously curly hair?

Will the Ents be getting bent…. Over?

Will the Wizard Radagast be getting Radanast-y?

Will the dwarves “delving too greedily and too deep” take on a much different meaning?

Will I be making Lord of the Rings sex puns all day?

The answer to that last question is: No. I will be making them for the rest of my life.

(image: New Line Cinemas)

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Brittany Knupper

Brittany is a lifelong Californian (it's a big state, she can't find her way out!) who currently resides in sunny Los Angeles with her gigantic, vaguely cat-shaped companion Gus. If you stumble upon her she might begin proselytizing about Survivor, but give her an iced coffee and she will calm down.