Did British actress Adjoa Andoh accuse the "Lord of the Rings" movies of blackface over a scene where Frodo's face was covered in ash? No, that's not true: Accounts that boosted the claim on social media as real took it from a self-described satire page. No credible news organizations reported the purported controversy.
The story originated from a post (archived here) on Facebook on March 9, 2026. It read:
British actress Adjoa Andoh has BLASTED Frodo Baggins of Lord of The Rings accusing the hobbit of BLACKFACE and calling for the trilogy to be banned in the UK. Director Peter Jackson says Frodo 'wasn't doing blackface' but that his face was covered in soot because he was inside an 'active volcano'. But Adjoa explains: 'I am not buying that for a second. This is just another white man flashing his big ring that was earned off the backs of slaves. We want reparations. Now get this book and those films banned right now!!' she Mordor'd ❤️
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: @The Lamented post on Facebook.)
British actress Adjoa Andoh (archived here), however, never said what the post attributed to her.
The page that first published the claim had a disclaimer (archived here) that read:
The Lamented: where truth goes to die and sarcasm reigns supreme. Serving up satire, nonsense, and gloriously unreliable stories.
The same page also categorized its content as satire:
(Image source: screenshot of The Lamented page on Facebook.)
Yet, other accounts -- for example, here (archived here) and here (archived here) -- later republished the story without a satire disclaimer.
Remarkably, Google's AI summary determined that the story was real (archived here):
(Image source: google.com.)
No credible journalistic sources corroborated the story from the satire page as a search on Google News (archived here, here and here) showed.
(Image source: Google News.)
