Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies almost had naked hobbits

A while back, there was a stir among The Lord of the Rings fans following reports that Amazon’s new LOTR series was requiring background actors to be “comfortable with partial or full nudity.” The show was also allegedly hiring an intimacy coordinator, which implied there were going to be sex scenes.

Now, I don’t consider myself a prude — this is a Game of Thrones fansite, after all — but I can see why these fans were concerned, since The Lord of the Rings is traditionally a very chaste sort of franchise; characters just don’t get down in this story, it’s not something author J.R.R. Tolkien ever seemed interested in. Adding nudity and sex into the new series reads as a blatant attempt to cash in on the success of Game of Thrones, which had those things in spades. But what works in Westeros doesn’t necessarily work in Middle-earth, and the producers of the Amazon show would do well to note that.

Several fans have taken it further and started a Change.org petition to keep nudity and sex out of Amazon’s show, which is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth. “Tolkien’s creations have always been mostly FAMILY friendly…KEEP IT THAT WAY,” it reads. As of this writing, the petition has nearly 50,000 signatures.

Fans petition Amazon to keep nudity out of their new Lord of the Rings series

All that said, this isn’t the first time the producers on The Lord of the Rings franchise have contemplated nudity, something we learned the other night when actors Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd — who played the hobbits Merry and Pippin in Peter Jackson’s movies — visited The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and described a bare naked scene that was cut from The Two Towers.

“Here’s the thing. There was almost nudity in the movies,” Boyd said. “[Screenwriter and producer] Philippa Boyens…she wrote a scene, because we’d been doing some kind of gags and winding people up…[and] she said, ‘Oh, it’s a new scene we’re filming next week, with the Ents. When Merry and Pippin are up Treebeard, he gets afraid and shakes his branches, which makes you guys fall, and as you hit all the branches on the way down, by the time you hit the ground, you’re naked. And Merry turns to Pippin and says, ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ And Pippin says, ‘Hold me, Merry.’’

Monaghan, at least, was up for it.. “I was kind of into it. I have a really fantastic ass. I thought now is the time to get it out.”

Now, obviously this scene would’ve been played for laughs, which is closer to the spirit of The Lord of the Rings…although it’s still kinda weird and I’m glad they didn’t go through with it. It sounds like Amazon is going for something a little heavier, although we won’t know for sure until it comes out on Amazon Prime Video, likely sometime next year.

Or maybe it’s caught wind of this discussion and decided to rethink things. What do you make of this? Do sex and nudity belong in a story set in Middle-earth?

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h/t IndieWire