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Film

07th Oct 2020

Lord of the Rings TV show rumoured to include sex and nudity, and fans aren’t happy

Wil Jones

What is the difference between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones? One has loads of sex, the other doesn’t.

Ok, there’s a lot more than that. One is filled with magic, whereas the other explicitly played that down. Lord of the Rings was also about building a world rich with historical lore, whereas Game of Thrones is more about politics. George RR Martin seems a lot more nihilistic than Tolkien as well.

But the level of sex in GoT is important to this story.

There is a Lord of the Rings television show coming to Amazon Prime. Set before the events of the book and film trilogy, details are still quite sparse. But fansite The One Ring has reported that casting calls have requested actors that are “comfortable with nudity,” and that there are rumours that an intimacy co-ordinator has also be sought.

There are no sex scenes in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, and neither is there any sex or nudity in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy.

Of course, none of this is confirmed, but it would be a pretty fair guess that the possible addition of sex might be the producers trying to make the show more like Game of Thrones. Which would be pretty understandable since that show brought fantasy TV from something discussed primarily on messageboards to something basically everyone in the Western world watched without a hint of embarrassment.

Some Lord of the Rings fans are not happy though.


Some fans have pointed out that while the LOTR trilogy is basically sexless, JRR Tolkien was not afraid of going a little blue in his other works which were set in the same world.

The Lord of the Rings series is set to be the most expensive television show of all time, with Amazon set to spend $1 billion over five seasons. The show is planned to debut in 2021.