This pandemic has given everyone a lot of time to do things that nobody should ever really have time to do, like jigsaw puzzles, which is why we’re seeing so many famous people reuniting with the other famous people they were in movies with a few years ago. You think Steve Zahn can just call up Ethan Embry for fun? No, not with all of the stress and pressures of life as a celebrity. Anyway, the latest famous person who is doing something fun that they would otherwise not have any time to do is Andy Serkis, who announced on Twitter that he’s going to stream himself reading through all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for charity starting tomorrow morning and going for… somewhere around 12 hours.
The specific charities are the U.K.’s NHS Charities Together and Best Beginnings, with a GoFundMe page offering more details and a link to where you can see the stream. Deadline says he’ll be doing this “with no breaks,” but both that story and Serkis’ video neglect to answer the only question we care about: Is he going to do the voices? He does one voice in particular in the video, but if we’re listening to someone read through a whole book in one sitting then we better hear all the voices. Also, The Hobbit really just works better in one sitting, huh? Not chopped up into three sittings, with some supplementary material packed in?
26 Comments
I’ll pay him not to.
Yeah! Fuck charity!
You can give my money to cancer kids or Ethiopians or whatever. Just as long as Monkey Boy doesn’t read aloud to me.
I guess we need a resident asshole to make the rest of us look a little better, right? Thanks for taking one for the team.
yeah, we take turns.
This attitude makes me want to pay him to find you and read it to you, specifically, once a day until the end of the quarantine.
Cancer Kids is the name of my boy band! (We were all born in early July)
The greatest shame of the fall of the AV Club commentariat is that comedy gold like this only gets a handful of stars.
You can always donate and not listen. Don’t let celebrities rob your agency!
Can’t I just give to charity ‘cause it’s a nice thing to do?
You’re being charitable calling Serkis a celebrity.
The guy has been in a few movies as more than just a motion capture guy, so yeah, he’s a celebrity.
Elrond has spoken!
No, there must always be an ulterior motive for charity.
You’re Carole Baskin, aren’t you?
Dude, don’t make a Barsanti shitfest even worse than it already is. It’s like you’re taking a dump on a cold TV dinner in here.
Oh, now that you out it that way . . . I’m . . . sorry.
We’re all in this together. In these trying times. Of Barsanti shitfests.
0/10 troll.
Can he do it as Caesar from the Planet of the Apes movies? Mostly grunts, growls, and hoots with the occasional snarled word?
And it’ll probably be shorter than the film trilogy.
12 hours? thats like 6 hours less than the movies
Oh hold on, news is rapidly changing, apparently it’s going to be two… wait three reading sessions! And he’ll be improving some stuff about a sexy elf and a Martin Starr looking guy using oranges as fake boobs.
You know you fucked up when Barsanti beats you to a joke.
Oh shit, is it in the article? I am disgraced.
‘The Hobbit’ is a great book for reading aloud. Some friends and I once did a thing where we all brought in a favourite book from childhood and read a section from it aloud to each other. ‘The Hobbit’ was my book and I read from the part after the massive dinner at Bilbo’s place, where the dwarfs sing about home and Bilbo starts to imagine adventures. Not to toot my own horn, but it went down well.