Make no mistake, the discourse surrounding Anya Taylor-Joy’s recent admission that she has yet to crack open a single page of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” is entirely misguided. Speaking to Variety at Monday night’s Apple TV premiere—an event I attended, having shared a remarkably intimate nod with her publicist near the craft services table—Taylor-Joy confessed she was a strict “Harry Potter” loyalist as a child. She noted, almost apologetically, that she is “about to” read the Middle-earth saga now that she has been cast in Warner Bros.’ upcoming “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.”
I am writing this to formally urge her to do no such thing.
For decades, we have saddled our most luminescent cinematic talents with the archaic expectation that they must consume the original source material of the IP they are handsomely paid to inhabit. It is a cruel and unusual burden. We do not ask the CEO of Boeing to understand the aerodynamics of a jet engine, nor do we expect our politicians to read the bills they pass. Why, then, do we demand that an actress whose primary cinematic function is to look breathtakingly, ethereally stressed in high-contrast lighting subject herself to thousands of pages of fictional genealogical tables and agonizingly detailed descriptions of elven foliage?
The sheer physical toll of reading Tolkien is incompatible with the modern press tour. A star of Taylor-Joy’s caliber cannot be expected to maintain her flawless red-carpet posture if she has spent the last three months hunched over “The Silmarillion,” trying to parse the difference between a Valar and a Maiar. The eye strain alone could jeopardize millions of dollars in future cosmetics sponsorships. These books are heavy, they are dense, and frankly, they do not contain a single instruction on how to hit a mark while wearing fifty pounds of prosthetic ears.
I recall a lunch I had at San Vicente Bungalows with a prominent casting director—who shall remain nameless, though I will say they recently populated a major HBO prestige drama. We wept over our branzino as we discussed the tragic decline of an A-list actor who made the fatal error of reading the graphic novel his superhero franchise was based on. He arrived on set laden with ideas about his character’s canonical motivations. He began questioning the director’s choice to replace the story’s poignant anti-war climax with a sky-beam CGI battle. He had, in short, been corrupted by the text. He was quietly killed off in the sequel, his career reduced to doing independent cinema in the Balkans.
This is the danger Taylor-Joy faces if she follows through on her threat to read the books. Ignorance of the lore is not a weakness; it is the ultimate blank canvas.
If an actor comes to my set knowing what a palantír is, my entire production week is ruined.
Denning is entirely correct. An actor’s job is to emote convincingly against a tennis ball on a green screen, not to harbor secret, deeply held opinions about Tom Bombadil. When Taylor-Joy steps onto the soundstage, she needs to be spiritually empty, ready to receive the frantic, last-minute script revisions texted to her by a panicked studio executive. If her mind is cluttered with Tolkien’s prose, she might experience cognitive dissonance when asked to integrate a seamless product placement for a mythical energy drink into her scene with Gollum.
Consider the logistics of the production itself. “The Hunt for Gollum” is being shepherded by Peter Jackson and directed by Andy Serkis. These are men who have already spent decades of their lives trapped in the mines of Tolkien’s imagination. They do not need Taylor-Joy to bring her own interpretation of the text to the table; they need her to stand precisely where she is told so the Wētā FX servers do not crash. If she reads the books, she might start asking questions about the thematic resonance of the elves leaving Middle-earth. Do you know how much money it costs every time an actor asks a lore question on a set of this scale? Upwards of fifty thousand dollars a minute in delayed rendering times.
We must also consider the emotional labor of reading J.R.R. Tolkien. The man survived the trenches of World War I, and his trauma is woven into every harrowing march across the Gorgoroth plains. Is it really fair to ask a young fashion icon to absorb the generational despair of the Battle of the Somme just so a few basement-dwelling purists feel validated? We have stunt doubles for physical falls; we should absolutely have literary doubles for heavy reading. Let a production assistant absorb the trauma of the fall of Gondolin. Taylor-Joy should only be handed a single, sanitized page of dialogue each morning, preferably printed on soothing, lavender-scented cardstock.
It is actually quite brilliant that she grew up a “Harry Potter” fan instead. This proves she fundamentally understands the concept of a multi-billion-dollar fantasy ecosystem, which is all the studio really requires. She knows what a wand is; she can easily map that cognitive architecture onto a staff. She understands the concept of a dark lord. The specifics are just interchangeable widgets in the great content machine. A wizard is a wizard, whether he is teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts or falling off a bridge in Moria.
I myself have never read a word of Tolkien, a choice that has preserved my critical objectivity and allowed me to properly evaluate the films based solely on the quality of their premiere after-parties. I saw the original trilogy at a series of exclusive screenings in the early 2000s, seated comfortably away from the unwashed masses who were aggressively whispering about the appendices. I was not burdened by knowing what was supposed to happen next; I was simply swept away by the sheer volume of the marketing budget.
Anya, if you or your reps are reading this—and I know they are, as we shared a very meaningful nod—I implore you to step away from the paperback. Do not let the internet bully you into literacy. You are a star, and stars do not read. They are read. Leave the dusty tomes to the fans, and save your beautiful, unburdened eyes for the teleprompter.