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Laila Rouass is going to be Conan’s mother

According to a trusted source, the mother, who gives birth to Conan on the battlefield and dies in the process, has been cast. It’s Laila Rouass! A UK born actress spending most of her career so far on the TV screens of the world. According to the plot synopsis and her casting description, the role for Conan’s mother is not really that extensive, so we won’t see much of her on screen.

She certainly is a pretty woman – with the right curves on the right places – though I wonder how the mixture of Perlman and her should produce a son like Momoa. Perlman looking like a brutish man from the stone-age (that is meant in the most positive way possible) and she looking like a delicate Indian flower. As always it will be down to Make-up, how she will look in the scene. The whole blood and mud combination though can produce practically any effect and look one can imagine. She has a very strong face and I hope those beautiful eyes are able to capture the viewer in her dying moments and evoke some emotion.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 at 12:28 am and is filed under Conan Movie Rumours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • m

    I can somewhat see an influence on momoa from her . no probs here. btw, after finishing the cimmerian article on momoa looking impressive as conan, it stated he will be revealed in july at some convention. hopefully something will leak out sooner.Just glad cimmerian women on film don’t look like cimmerian men .( so far!)

  • Finn

    Fire and wind come from the sky, from the gods of the sky. But Crom is your god, Crom and he lives in the earth. Once, giants lived in the Earth, Conan. And in the darkness of chaos, they fooled Crom into dating a white girl, and they took from him the enigma of race mixing. Crom was angered. And the Earth shook. Fire and wind struck down these giants, and they threw their bodies into the waters, but in their rage, the gods forgot the secret of race mixing and left it on the battlefield. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men who want to date outside of our race. The secret of race mixing has always carried with it a mystery. You must learn its riddle, Conan. You must learn its discipline. For no one – no one in this world can you trust. Not men, not white women, not beasts. This you can trust.

    Also, I wonder what REH would think of these casting decisions with his social darwinist heirarchy of pure racial strains of celtic and nordic blood ideology. Could anyone say REH would like or approve of the casting decisions?

  • STEFAN

    Conan’s mother looks hotter than his girlfiend.
    They should cast Laila instead of Nichols.Rachel looks like a singer of MTV band.
    Yeah,Laila is real woman with the curves,strong appearance and beautiful eyes.To bad they going to kill her so soon.
    I mean,if that script has nothing with REH,at least they should let that beautiful woman to live much longer.
    As for Perlman,producers cast him as a revenge to REH fans.
    -You have complained Jason is to soft and to gay.What do you say now?
    His father looks like he came out from the cave right now.

  • http://www.thecimmerian.com Taranaich

    “Also, I wonder what REH would think of these casting decisions with his social darwinist heirarchy of pure racial strains of celtic and nordic blood ideology.”

    What “social darwinist heirarchy”? Is that nonsense still up at Wikipedia, with the 6’2″ Cormac comparison to Conan that doesn’t actually exist, and the 10,000 BC dating that Howard never mentioned?

    In any case, Laila Rouass is of Indian and Morrocan descent, which is pretty far from Cimmerian. Might as well cast her as a Medieval Irish or Scottish woman. I doubt Howard would consider Laila good casting for a Cimmerian woman. If I could imagine Howard’s reaction to this or any other casting decision, it would be laughter. He’d find it funny.

  • m

    He’d hopefully be laughing all the way to the bank. remember this ; it’s hollywood they’re experts at creating illusion. they can make a spansih chick seem indian an italian celtic a black guy white a morrocan seem what a cimmerian might be.It’s an actor’s job to create the illusion.How well they do it , well we’ll have to see. besides this chick is gonna be in what , maybe ten minutes of the movie? and like waldgeist said her makeup is gonna be important.Also race mixing has gone on will go on and will always go on as long as there’s sex to have. How many stygian chicks or hyrkanian or zamoran chicks you think conan could’ve knocked up in his travels? He could’ve fathered children all over the hyborian world, that stud!

  • Finn

    REH always seemed strongly influenced by social darwinism and eugenics to me. He had to have came across books on these subjects in his voracious reading at the library. It seems pretty obvious looking at what he wrote. I just googled it, and yes a bunch of wikipedia and other sites say it, so you have a lot of erasing to do.

    Yeah REH would want to get paid more than anything. But I remember reading some excerpt from a letter he wrote about burning hawaiians accused of rape that indicated he didn’t think too highly of them. Now we have a half-hawaiian Conan! :) :) :)

  • STEFAN

    Howard’s most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is supposed to have lived between the fall of Atlantis and the “rise of the sons of Arya” (i.e. the Aryans). In his story Wings In The Night, Howard also wrote:

    “The ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth”.
    (Wings of the Night)

  • m

    I think the whole man raised outside of nature concept like in tarzan and conan has a darwinian riff just by its very nature even if the authors never opened a page of darwin or nietzche for that matter ( we pretty much know they did )

  • m

    and weren’t the actual historical “aryans”at root a more mongolian/asian type rather than caucasian at all?

  • Finn

    From what I know, it’s more of a linguistic category for languages than a real racial group. But it was pretty popular idea back then, same ideas that influenced the nazis. It would have been interesting to see how REH reacted to WWII. I guess he would have enjoyed being drafted into war but felt conflicted about fighting the nazis.

  • http://www.ageofconan.com Waldgeist

    Finn, no you mistake REH for a racist. He absolutely wasn’t and he argued the whole aryan, racial thing with his friend H.P. Lovecraft a lot. H.P. very much was into the whole superior race and anti-race-mixing thing and REH could never accept his view on the subject.

    Of course his writing and description was clouded and influence by the wording and scientific view of the world at his time (aka black people being scientifically proven inferior to white people… crazy but that’s what they thought back then), but he was no racist or drawn to racism anymore than the average american was.

  • m

    I have read that about howard and lovecraft too( not on wikipedia either) and I even think towards the end howard may have softened lovecrafts stance too.Lovecraft was alledgedly devastated by howards death

  • Finn

    If we start trying to identify who was or wasn’t racist in the past based on modern criteria, then everyone winds up being a racist. REH talked about hanging niggers, tarring and feathering them, running them out of town, etc. Which was probably average american talk back then, or at least average southerner talk. I haven’t read the letters but I always got the impression he considered the white nordic and celtic races as superior races that could degenerate into lesser, darker more savage races over time, like picts.

  • Rabensblut

    I do not think Ron looks like a Brute from a Cave (yes he played one in the Quest for fire, I know but he is an excellent actor and some of his roles (city of lost children) show him as a very kind guy. He can play a demented monk, a caveman, a son of the devil, a man with lion’s face so why not Conan’s father…

  • m

    I think maybe he meant there’s always a race ready to step up when another race or civilization is in decline. another ascends peaks , and declines where someone else steps up. that the way it’s been over the couse of history, Howard seems to at least theorize that it goes against our more primal tribish nature. civilization supposes to frees people from these tribal survivalist natures but at the same time softens them against the elements.So based on this, when civilizations start to enter a state of decline I think howard believes people are not equipped to survive like his noble savages are.But first and foremost Howard was a writer of fiction and fantasy not a sociologist and this application of concepts , like lovecrafts use of cosmic horror create compelling odds for their heroes to survive against ( or not survive)In this day in age the darker side of howards writing isnt so much the babboon demons or outer gods and wizards conan or others contend with,it’s how to translate the race issues that were prevalent in his writing ( and many others at the time, howard probably wasn’t a hate monger per say but his views , perceived today can be interpreted as prejudiced or even racist by some.It’s a hard pill to swallow as a howard fan but to see his work preservere it should be a topic discussed and confronted)how do you sell that in a way thats realistic and not have groups boycotting it at the same time?I personnaly Don’t think his writing is as racist as in he doesnt promote the destruction of any group based on it but based on human nature in general , and one of our flaws he observes , is underestimating people based on race. Look at it this way, in conan , are not civilized folk always underestimating him based on his barbaric backround?

  • Finn

    Yeah, Conan’s own civilization has degenerated from Atlantean to Cimmerian, neither as savage as the Picts nor as weak as the Aquilonians. Both extremes wind up looking pretty bad in REH writing.

    I guess in this day and age in the west, the racial dimension to Howard’s writing can’t be literally translated literally onto the screen. Even the Conan movies, that was 25-30 years ago. I could imagine groups today protesting/complaining about Grace Jones’ character. And those movies are not exactly authentic REH. I am interested to see how the Solomon Kane movie skirts around the race issue since I remember a lot of those stories are set in Africa. Hopefully there will be a U.S. release.

  • m

    I hope so too.I would like to see it. and this is a topic definitely worthy of discussion.I think it( the racial aspect) can be translated to screen because despite how “enlightened” and politically correct we think we are,race and culture changes assimilations and prejudices will always be there, no matter what societies are dominant. like it said on that rush album in the 80′s ( haha) ” the more that things change the more they stay the same”

  • http://www.thecimmerian.com Taranaich

    “REH always seemed strongly influenced by social darwinism and eugenics to me. He had to have came across books on these subjects in his voracious reading at the library. It seems pretty obvious looking at what he wrote. I just googled it, and yes a bunch of wikipedia and other sites say it, so you have a lot of erasing to do.”

    It’s only “obvious” if you’re reading into it. Social Darwinism is about rooting out undesireable qualities to create a superior race, usually involving social or political programming to “breed” a better people. This isn’t the case in Howard at all: most of the time his “super races” would become decadent, lazy and corrupt, leading for a cruder, barbaric race to usurp them, only for them to then become decadent and corrupt, and another new barbarian race will rise up, and continue the cycle.

    “Howard’s most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is supposed to have lived between the fall of Atlantis and the “rise of the sons of Arya” (i.e. the Aryans).”

    The “Aryans” in this case referring to the Indo-Europeans, as was popular usage at the time. This was before the Nazis appropriated the term for their ends.

    “In his story Wings In The Night, Howard also wrote:

    “The ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth”.”

    People always forget the context of that quote. This is a *vision* by Solomon Kane, a white European from the 16th Century. It isn’t a statement of reality or perceived eventuality on Howard’s part. Most pertinently, it doesn’t even reflect the rest of REH’s work: in “The Last White Man” white people are the first to fall due to their complacency and decadence.

    “It would have been interesting to see how REH reacted to WWII. I guess he would have enjoyed being drafted into war but felt conflicted about fighting the nazis.”

    What? REH despised the Nazis with a vengeance. In his letters he’s constantly criticizing the “Fascists of Europe”, especially Mussolini and the Italian Fascists, but he also condemned the Germans for their book-burning, oppression and militarism. He would have zero conflicting feelings in fighting the Nazis.

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