For the cast of The Witcher, doing press for season three must be a bizarre experience.
For one, Henry Cavill himself isn’t doing any. The other reason? He’s actually leaving the show. This will be his last season donning Geralt’s white wig and sword, something his castmates - Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan and Joey Batey - are keenly aware of.
“We found out quite a few months after wrapping… we found out the day before the world found out. It was a shock. Everyone was in shock at the same time,” Freya Allan, who plays Geralt’s surrogate daughter Ciri, says.
“I cried when I found out; I just didn’t expect it. I feel very connected to him through our characters.”
Instead of Cavill, season four will begin filming with Aussie actor Liam Hemsworth in the titular role – something that seems to have been done rather hastily. Did Chalotra, Batey or Allan (Chalotra and Batey play sorceress Yennefer and bard Jaskier) do any chemistry readings with Hemsworth, or meet him before the news broke? “No, we didn’t. We just got told the day before it was announced,” Allan says. “So it was a lot.”
“We’ve reached out and done our best to welcome [Hemsworth],” Batey says. “We’ve emailed and exchanged book quotes, that sort of thing. And by all accounts, it sounds like he’s just in training. Like he’s taking on the role incredibly seriously.”
Is he a fan of the books, I ask? Batey smiles politely. “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t be doing it if he wasn’t.”
Cavill aside, the mood is buoyant in the room. We’re speaking a few days before Netflix launch season three of The Witcher: the juggernaut show that follows the adventures of Geralt, a monster-hunter or “Witcher”, and his friends in a Polish-inspired fantasy world.
With three seasons now under their belts, the cast have been inhabiting and growing alongside their characters for years. On the one hand, that’s a good thing: it means they know them inside and out.
On the other hand: “you certainly have to leave the characters at the door at the end of the shoot,” Batey says.
“I mean, Jaskier has got a bit of a tendency to follow me around if I don’t purposely put him in a box.” In what sense? His confidence, he says – as well as his ability to be the centre of attention.
“I kind of rely on that energy and then letting that go, you can kind of get a little withdrawal from it for a while.”
Though most people might be more aware of The Witcher video game franchise, the show itself is actually loosely adapted from the bestselling books by Andrzej Sapkowski. However, whatever makes it in is down to a running negotiation with showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich.
“I fought for one particular scene [that] features all four of us,” Batey says. This is clearly news to Chalotra (who plays sorceress Yennefer) who is incredulous at the idea it wasn’t a done deal from the beginning. “I asked for it to put in, which is where Ciri and Jaskier are mocking Yennefer and Geralt and whispering away in the bushes. And that’s one of my favourite moments in the books.
“There are a couple of other scenes… Lauren is just so collaborative and so open to all these ideas. So it’s lovely to be a part of her show.... it’s not just, ‘say the lines,’ you know, she welcomes offerings.”
One of the most famous “offerings”, of course, is Batey’s songwriting. Working together with the show’s musical team, he went viral when the first season aired for his rendition of Toss A Coin to Your Witcher (if you know, you know) and he has worked on the music his character sings in following seasons, too.
“In season one, there’s a big facade to it. It’s very playful and flirtatious,” Batey says. “By season two, it becomes quite vulnerable, a little bit broken. And then season three, there’s a little bit of hope there… that’s the arc that I really fought for and hope that people see.”
It’s not just Jaskier who gets a bigger character arc this season, either: Allan’s reluctant princess Ciri also takes more of a central role. In addition to learning to control her magic, Ciri has also been taught how to handle a sword, and accordingly Allan had to undergo rigorous training.
“When you first get handed a sword, it feels awkward. Having that is like another limb… learning how to move with it is the first thing you need to do in order to make it not look weird,” she says.
“Ciri has obviously been trained by Geralt. So it’s important for us to see part of Geralt’s style within Ciri’s, but also making it her own. She’s got a completely different body type. So she’s more agile. [It’s about] really showing that in the way that I move, but whilst also having that little nuance of Geralt in there.”
That same ethos applies to Chalotra, whose character Yennefer uses a combination of words and hand signals to cast her magic.
“Because there is more magic, and so many people want to see more of it, I thought it’d be best if I worked with Wolfie [Wolfgang Stegemann, one of the stunt choreographers] to elevate what that would look like for Yennefer,” she says.
“So there were specific moves that we talked about pulling from Indian dance moves, specifically with the hands, because that’s a focal point in Indian dance. That would lend itself well to Yennefer in [particular]; that’s something I know very well.”
With season three hitting screens soon and season four getting ready to shoot, what is it that keeps people coming back to The Witcher?
Batey doesn’t hesitate. “I think it’s Sapkowski,” he says, to nods from the other two.
“Sapkowski took myths, legends; subverted them, and used these characters to really make a commentary on our actual world. And these characters are so beloved because of their fallibility, their failures, but also their strengths.
“And it just comes down to that to the words that he wrote… it has to start with him. We bumped into him the other day, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, the Creator!’”
