Anya Taylor-Joy will play Seren in The Hunt for Gollum

The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum has added a major name to its cast: Anya Taylor-Joy.

The actress will play Seren, an original character created for the film: a Sindar elf from the Woodland Realm, close to King Thranduil and described as a trusted and lethal presence. Through her, the story may move closer to a territory already present in Tolkien’s work: the Silvan court and the strategic role of Mirkwood in the years leading up to the War of the Ring.

Peter Jackson is among the producers, Andy Serkis will direct the film and will personally return as Gollum/Sméagol, Ian McKellen will reprise the role of Gandalf, Elijah Wood that of Frodo, while Lee Pace will return as Thranduil. Among the new cast members so far are Jamie Dornan as Strider/Aragorn, Kate Winslet as Marigol, and Leo Woodall as Halvard.

Marigol is a character created for the film: the name phonetically recalls Marigold, Sméagol and Déagol, and therefore seems to suggest a likely connection to the race of Halflings. Halvard, also an original character, instead evokes by assonance Halbarad, a Dúnadan connected to Aragorn’s Grey Company.

The film is expected to arrive in theaters on December 17, 2027.

Ian McKellen leaving Rome for New Zealand

In these very hours, in Rome, during an event connected to a film presented for Cinema in Piazza, Ian McKellen has announced that he is about to leave for New Zealand, where he will once again take on the role of Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum.

This is not the first time the actor has hinted at something about the film. In a previous appearance at the London panel For the Love of Fantasy, McKellen had suggested that both Frodo and Gandalf would appear in the story, before closing off any further details with an eloquent: “My lips are sealed.”

The confirmed presence of Elijah Wood as Frodo, however, raises an interesting question: how much of the film will be direct narrative, and how much will be memory, framing, reconstruction? If the main story revolves around the hunt for Gollum before the central events of The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo’s return suggests that the film will necessarily also move on a retrospective level, using the memory of the War of the Ring to reinterpret an episode that remained on the margins of the saga.

The Hunt for Gollum, after all, does not come from a standalone novel or from a chapter already fully prepared for adaptation. Rather, it emerges from chronologies, hints, retrospective dialogue, the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and the speculation of the Tolkien fandom.

The Hunt for Gollum: Seren, the Elves and the fault line in power

After the events of The Hobbit, Gollum becomes an elusive and extremely dangerous presence, because he carries with him a fragment of truth about the Ring, the name Baggins and the land called the Shire. First he is drawn into the shadow of Mordor, where Sauron manages to extract crucial information from him; then he is tracked down and captured in the Dead Marshes by Aragorn, and handed over to the Elves of Thranduil’s Woodland Realm.

There, under the custody of Gandalf and the Silvan Elves, Gollum remains a prisoner for a long time, at least until the moment when he once again manages to escape. During the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring, Legolas arrives in Rivendell precisely as a messenger of his father, to report that the creature has escaped from the watch of the Elves.

The Hunt for Gollum seems destined to tell the story of a breach in History: the point at which what should have been controlled continues instead to slip away. The entire story of Gollum, after all, is a sequence of impossible imprisonments. He is a prisoner of the Ring even before losing it. He is a prisoner of desire, hunger, fear, and the corrupted memory of what he once was. He is imprisoned in Mordor, then in the hands of Aragorn, then in the custody of the Elves, and yet each time he manages to survive, to deform, to escape.

Seren, a character created specifically for The Hunt for Gollum, could become the narrative thread of the film: the ancient and wounded nobility of the Silvan Elves, the shadow once again pressing from Dol Guldur, the troubled custody in the Woodland Realm of one of the most dangerous secrets of the Third Age, and the miserable yet decisive presence of a creature destined to escape every form of control.