“THERE ARE NO BLACK PEOPLE IN RIVENDELL, IT’S UNREALISTIC”

To be honest, I absolutely would expect the cast to be way more diverse if the movies were shot today. It’s shocking how white those movies are- I’m pretty sure the haradrim are the only on-screen POC in the entire trilogy. The Hobbit movies tried to correct for this by having POC extras in the crowd scenes in Laketown, and some of them may have even had a few lines. Still no actual characters though

It’s kinda funny that the terrible Dungeons and Dragons movie with Jeremy Irons that came out a year before Fellowship had an elf portrayed by a black actor as one of the main characters