Lord of the Rings actress lobbies for a female Gandalf

Amazon Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings TV series is one of many epic fantasy shows coming down the pipeline now that HBO’s Game of Thrones has come to an end. And one of Game of Thrones’ greatest strengths was its portrayal of strong and fleshed-out female characters, many of whom defied the traditional tropes of the fantasy genre. We wanted to follow their stories just as much as — if not more than — their guys in the cast.

All of the series trying to become the “next Game of Thrones” will have to make the same kinds of strides when it comes to representing women if they hope to have the same impact, and Robyn Malcolm, who portrayed Morwen in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies (the Rohirrim woman who sped her two children away in The Two Towers when Saruman’s forces attacks), knows how Amazon’s new show can do just that.

In an interview with Stuff, the actress, who appeared in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, suggested that the upcoming TV series give Gandalf’s role to a woman. “Those old legends, those old mythical stories, they’re so based within a patriarchal landscape,” Malcolm said. “Why not look at the magic of a matrilineal world, where the magical powerhouses are women?”

It would be refreshing to see some of these stories with a more diverse cast. Making the “magical powerhouse” of The Lord of the Rings a woman may create a role similar to that of Moiraine, the Aes Sedai from Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, which is also being adapted by Amazon and touted as the next Game of Thrones.

“We’ve got uteruses, and back in the day, there was a real sort of magic and sacredness and sort of brutality around that,” Malcolm added. “We’ve had female Hamlets. Why not?”

Malcolm went on to list her picks for the role, saying that the chosen actress would need to have “gravitas and a real lot of personal power” to pull it off. Among her suggestions were Rena Owen, Rachel House, Dame Judi, Eileen Atkins, and Maggie Smith.

Now, this suggestion is purely academic, because Amazon’s show is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, before Gandalf and the other wizards turned up. So Gandalf very probably won’t appear in the show at all, as a man or a woman.

But let’s continue with this as a thought experiment anyway. If a series were to go ahead with a female Gandalf, it would likely receive a fair amount of backlash from hardcore Tolkienites. We’ve seen similar reactions to broadening the casts of franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’d be bound to happen here as well. In fact, some fans have already expressed their disapproval of a female Gandalf, while others are just flabbergasted by the idea of Gandalf not being played by Sir Ian McKellen, which, okay, fair.

Nerdrotic’s Gary Buecher even uploaded a video about how much he disliked the idea. “No,” he says. “It’s time for you to create your own goddamned story. Now, Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, that’s where I put my foot down and I have promised…I will dedicate my entire channel to bringing down Amazon if they screw with Lord of the Rings.”

Again, this isn’t going to happen in any case, but the passion here should tell you something.

Unfortunately, women writers have frequently been barred from the genre up until fairly recently, so creating “their own goddamned story” may be more difficult than hoping to finally be given a bigger part in a more well-known one. There’s really no reason Gandalf couldn’t be played by a woman, or barring that, a series could create a bigger role for another female character, whether drawn from Tolkien’s legendarium or created from whole cloth.

In general, the genderbending of typically male roles is certainly a concept we could start embracing more. It’s worked for Shakespearean adaptations time and time again, so why not our favorite SFF stories?

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