Actor John Rhys-Davies has never been one to shy away from expressing politically incorrect opinions — but now the Lord of the Rings star says he’s been blacklisted by certain people in Hollywood for speaking out on controversial issues.
“I know there are certain people in Hollywood who would not work with me because I have said things that are not PC,” the 72-year-old actor told Fox411 in an interview this week. “I have lost friends and that saddens me.”
Rhys-Davies — who is perhaps best known for playing Gimli in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Salah in Raiders of the Lost Ark — has lashed out at the concept of political correctness in several interviews over the past year, including one with this reporter in October.
“The damnable thing about political correctness is that it’s making us all shy of speaking out,” Rhys-Davies told Breitbart News last year. “We fear to throw out ideas that may in themselves sound stupid, but may have the germs of a possible alternative way of solving problems. We’re all so scared of being labeled. ‘He’s a racist, he’s a neo-fascist.’ That belief is simply not consonant with our modern liberal way of thinking.”
In his conversation with Fox, the actor — who currently stars in the MTV fantasy series The Shannara Chronicles — said that he often disagrees with the political opinions of his fellow actors in Hollywood, but “true art asks uncomfortable questions” and “civilization is kept alive and vital by debate.”
He added that the very concept of free speech comes from Judeo-Christian Western civilization, which is itself under attack.
“The world is a dirtier and darker place now than it has probably been for 200 years,” Rhys-Davies told Fox411. “Western civilization is profound and tolerant and we are now confronted with a far more vital and energetic civilization…[that is] completely antithetical to our beliefs, and how we cope with that is going to be the big challenge for the [21st]century [because we] will lose it if we don’t defend it in the right way.”
The actor’s comments to Fox echo what he told Breitbart News in October, when he said that Western Christian civilization is one of the “great glories of mankind” that could be undermined by forces determined to tear it apart.
“These are the things we stand for. We stand for liberty, liberty of association, freedom of speech. We stand for the equality of everyone in our society before the law, men as well as women. We could make a list of all the things,” Rhys-Davies told this reporter in October.
“But let’s get back to respecting these things. These are the glories of our ancestors. These are what thousands of our ancestors died to protect and preserve. And if we allow those things to go because we are afraid of being politically incorrect, or of hurting somebody by suggesting that perhaps their value system may not be quite as nice as ours, then we are fools, and ultimately, scoundrels,” he added.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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