STEPHEN COLBERT IS GOING TO BE IN ‘THE HOBBIT?’
Political funnyman Stephen Colbert, who was a former “correspondent” on The Daily Show, and now hosts his own mock right-wing talk show The Colbert Report, has landed a role in one of Peter Jackson’s upcoming Hobbit films, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The role is an unspecified cameo, and it won’t bein the first film, An Unexpected Journey, so the earliest we’ll see Colbert show up in Middle Earth is December 13, 2013, when the Desolation of Smaug is released. Colbert is a longtime Tolkien fan, and he teased his appearance in one of the films in a recent Playboy interview:
When asked if he was hired as an extra, Colbert smiled; and in response to the question, “Are you telling us you’re in the Hobbit movie?” he responded, with another smile, “Could be.”
Peter Jackson is starting to worry me with these Hobbit films. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Colbert’s style of humor and the writing on his Colbert Report show is razor-sharp, but these films feel like they are drifting into over-the-top wacky territory. I realize that the tone of The Hobbit is very different from The Lord of the Rings (it is a kid’s book, after all), but there’s an air of forced zaniness and slapstick just oozing off of the trailers that’s worrisome (not to mention the whole “one book stretched into three movies” thing).
Whatever role Colbert ends up playing, I just hope it’s not overly kooky — and for Pete’s sake, Peter (ha!) — don’t inject his role with anything political. No one wants to see an elf spout out a line about foreign policy with Moira or securing the border from illegal orcs crossing over from Mordor and leeching off the hard-working taxpayers of Gondor.
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