Race row after woman told she is 'too dark' to be a Hobbit

A British woman of Pakistani origin was reportedly turned away from auditions for Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit in New Zealand on the basis that she was not white enough.

Naz Humphreys, who is 5ft tall, had travelled to Hamilton from Auckland last Tuesday in the hope of securing an extra role on Peter Jackson's forthcoming two-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien's classic fantasy tale. However, according to the Waikato Times, she was told after a three-hour wait that her skin tone made it unlikely she would be cast.

"It's 2010 and I still can't believe I'm being discriminated against because I have brown skin," Ms Humphreys told the Waikato Times. "The casting manager basically said they weren't having anybody who wasn't pale-skinned."

According to the newspaper, a video shows a film company representative telling the crowd: "We are looking for light-skinned people. I'm not trying to be – whatever. It's just the brief. You've got to look like a hobbit."

Ms Humphreys, a social policy researcher, had travelled to New Zealand on a working holiday along with her husband, both of them being keen Lord of the Rings fans. She has now set up a Facebook page entitled "Hire Hobbits of all colours! Say No to Hobbit racism!"

"I would love to be an extra," said Ms Humphreys. "But it just seemed like a shame because obviously hobbits are not brown or black or any other colour. They all look kind of homogenised beige and all derived from the Caucasian gene pool.

"In 2010, a movie company should be representing all its viewers. It's not just going to be white people seeing The Hobbit, but people from all over the world."

That's ridiculous. Yeh, let's just change the whole ****ing backstory so one silly little woman can talk to her grandkids about how she was in the background of some ****ty sequel.