REPORT: New Lord of the Rings Series Hires “Intimacy Coordinator” and actors “comfortable with nudity”

Tolkien lovers and fans of the Peter Jackson Middle Earth movies are looking forward to the upcoming Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, premiering September 2, 2022 on the Prime Video streaming service.

The series is reportedly the most expensive TV series ever made, with the Hollywood Reporter confirming production of the first season will cost Amazon $465 million U.S. dollars. It is still unclear if that includes the purchase price of the filming rights at $250 million. Either way, this puts the price tag of the actual production far above other shows in the genre, with a single season of Game of Thrones estimated at $100 million U.S. dollars.

With that, Amazon needs this show to appeal to as many audiences as possible in order to legitimize spending that amount of money. Or… will it be another Game of Thrones?

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are considered by many to be clean, Christian-friendly entertainment free of sexual content, political ideology, or coarse language that so many other blockbusters trend towards. (More on this idea in a moment).

The show will reportedly stay away from characters that appear primarily in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and will focus on the Second Age, which is a thousand years before the main action of the Middle Earth films. However, fans will most likely recognize the names of Galadriel, Elrond, and Sauron. (Maybe even Celebor is you’ve read the books). Younger versions of these characters appear in the series, which portrays the forging of the Rings of Power.

Some areas of concern:
1. The Tolkien fan-site TheOneRing.net reported that casting calls for the series included a call for actors “comfortable with nudity” and that the production “need Nude people based in Auckland — age 18 plus, all shapes and size”
2. The same casting call includes a request for cast described as “androgynous.”
3. An Intimacy Coordinator by the name of Jennifer Ward-Lealand has publicly stated that she was working on an Amazon production in New Zealand, later confirmed to be Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
4. In a now-removed promotional video marketing the show, a male “superfan” described his fantasy of a relationship with Sauron, the future “Dark Lord” of the main series.

To provide additional context, it is possible that the nudity is not sexual in nature. There is some nudity in the books, but it is only briefly mentioned and associated with bathing and other casual instances and never in mixed circumstances. Despite the theatrical versions of the Peter Jackson films being free of nudity, their is a scene only in the extended edition of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that includes a wide shot of the dwarves bathing in a Rivendell fountain while Elrond and another elf played by Bret McKenzie looking on in humorous disgust.

For those unfamiliar with the term “androgynous,” this means a person that does not appear definitively male or female. There are many reasons this could be innocuous, including casting for non-human roles or other-worldly beings, of which there are many in the source texts.

The intimacy coordinator is of greater concern. An intimacy coordinator is a crew member who specializes ensuring the safety and well-being of actors during sex scenes.

The co-creator and show runner Patrick McCay has stated that he intends the show to be appropriate for a spectrum of ages including adults and children as young as 11 years old, although they “might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes” for the scary parts.

Let’s hope he hits that target. Stay tuned for additional updates.

For those who pre-screen content for their children, be warned: the first season of the show will be 50 hours of content. Good luck!