She showed up to the casting call, and they turned her away. And they said, “No, you can’t be in this movie because you are too brown to be a hobbit.”

Now I’m going to repeat that for you: Somebody told a real-life woman that her skin was too brown to play an imaginary creature. That basically, in the whole fictional world of “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” where you have dragons and trolls and talking trees, where you draw the line, where imagination is tapped out — no more room — is for a brown hobbit.