The sad fate of any big-budget, high fantasy series is to be compared, however unfavourably, to Game of Thrones. It is as inevitable as any mob drama facing The Sopranos comparisons, or any animated sitcom being held up against The Simpsons. But for The Witcher, the comparison has been brutal. Not only has it failed to achieve the mainstream cut-through of its Westerosi cousin, but it has always been a different beast entirely. This, after all, is an unhinged world of magic and monsters and madness, not a political allegory for medieval Britain. And at the heart of all that was Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia.
“Just as Viggo Mortensen gave his face to Aragorn,” Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, font of the show’s lore, is reported to have said, “so Henry gave his to Geralt and it shall be forever so.” That, however, was not the opinion held by the bods at Netflix HQ, who announced in October last year that the third season of The Witcher, which concludes this week, will be Cavill’s last. From its fourth instalment onwards, the role will be played by Australian actor, and Thor’s little brother, Liam Hemsworth. This is not a minor tweak to the show, but a change to its DNA that would make Dr Jeckyll think twice.
Because Henry Cavill is Geralt, and Geralt is The Witcher. The show’s video game origins are well established, but with that comes a question of focalisation. After all, in a first-person video game, the audience inhabits the protagonist. Some, like The Last of Us, switch between perspectives, which made it easier for the narrative of HBO’s hit adaptation to generate empathy for both Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Others, such as Resident Evil and Halo, have suffered from the confining nature of being locked in the perspective of their hero. Of course, Witcher aficionados will point to the fact that the show is, actually, an adaptation of Sapkowski’s novels, not the games – but for the casual viewer the difference is immaterial. You play as Geralt, and you see the world of The Witcher through Henry Cavill’s eyes.
Netflix knew full well, when they cast Superman as their lead, that they were putting their strongest foot forward. Unlike Thrones, whose young ensemble cast were, even during the course of its run, being courted by Hollywood and magazine covers, The Witcher has retained a sense of Cavill’s dominance. The female leads – Anya Chalotra as Yennefer and Freya Allan as Ciri – have been strikingly absent from other projects. Chalotra, who should be, in Hollywood terms, at the peak of her career, hasn’t had a live-action role since The Witcher began, while Allan has only managed supporting roles in the little-seen The Third Day and the critically reviled Gunpowder Milkshake. It has meant that, for better, but often for worse, the responsibility for keeping The Witcher in the public consciousness has fallen to Cavill.
He is a man utterly unafraid of typecasting. His only acting awards, thus far, have been a 2014 “Best Hero” gong at the MTV Movie Awards, and the, um, coveted Worst Screen Combo (shared with Ben Affleck for Batman vs Superman) at the 2016 Golden Raspberries. But unlike almost every action star before him, Cavill does not give the impression that he secretly longs to be taken seriously – to tread the boards as Hamlet or star in some A24 awards-bait about living with chronic athlete’s foot – but instead seems perfectly happy where he is. At the lower end of the middlebrow mainstream. In the past decade, his only roles outside the DC universe involve playing Sherlock Holmes in Netflix’s Enola Holmes series, a Mission: Impossible film, a Guy Ritchie thriller, and a couple of war movies. Though it is an acting CV that an adolescent boy would aspire to, it also seems perfectly true to Cavill’s creative aspirations.
Sacking him – in favour of the much softer-edged Liam Hemsworth, ex of The Hunger Games and Miley Cyrus – came after reports labelled him as a toxic video-game obsessive who frequently rewrote scripts without consulting the show’s writers. The latter part is not widely disputed – after all, Cavill’s affection for The Witcher games saw him seek out the role of Geralt – and certainly not a sackable offence. Cavill, for his own part, has briefed a desire to try different things, and signed onto a new game adaptation, Amazon’s Warhammer 40,000 project.
Whichever narrative you believe, the change is dramatic. Because Cavill has always been the best thing about The Witcher, a blockbuster that has suffered from charisma-free supporting actors and writing that even ChatGPT would want to take a second pass at. Cavill’s performance, though, has always felt right: half dead-eyed video game avatar, half glistening live-action pugilist. Forget Michael Fassbender in Assassin’s Creed, Tom Holland in Uncharted, or even Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us: nobody is better than Cavill at making pixels flesh. A Change.org petition to keep Cavill currently has 319,000 signatories. But the fans are not going to get what they want. As Yennefer might say, “Nobody smart plays fair.”
The history of TV shows recasting major characters is short and inauspicious. Janet Hubert’s exit from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, for instance, is still a source of bitterness within the cast. Switches like Shailene Woodley mysteriously becoming Willa Holland in The OC, or Jane Levy being replaced by Emma Greenwell in Shameless, are usually explained away by a young actor becoming an incipient movie star. And even Game of Thrones, The Witcher’s nemesis, made Daario Naharis and Dickon Tarly shapeshift over the course of the run. But the decision to replace Cavill is unprecedented in terms of substituting the main character without resetting the rest of the cast. The closest thing, perhaps, is Doctor Who, where the alien lead metamorphoses every-so-often, but there’s nothing in The Witcher’s internal logic that will explain Hemsworth’s sudden appearance. Nor is there any attempt, at the end of this third series, to smooth that transition. “No matter his armies, no matter his walls,” Cavill grunts, in his final lines, “I will free Ciri.”
Cavill’s Geralt fights in the latest series of ‘The Witcher’— (Susan Allnutt/Netflix)
And then he’s off, walking into the sunset with Jaskier (Joey Batey). The job of freeing Ciri, therefore, will fall to Hemsworth, who looks like a Witcher who’s been raised on soy lattes, rather than Cavill’s Witcher, who has been hewn out of granite. The strangest thing about this strange situation is that Netflix, who have become purveyors predominantly of teen-focused dramas and reality TV, haven’t just taken this opportunity to get a project, which reportedly costs $10m an episode, off their books. “You lack originality,” Geralt growls at an adversary in one of his final fistfights. Perhaps that’s one of the lines that Cavill changed from under his writers’ noses – certainly, it feels like it could’ve been aimed at Netflix executives.
In a world where TV shows are judged by their capacity to be a “break-out” hit – to transcend the borders of their core audience and bring new viewers to diverse genres – The Witcher has remained firmly in its lane. And Cavill has been the heart of that, with his bruising, unshowy central performance. Jaded, perhaps, after his decades in Hollywood, and preferring World of Warcraft to Tinseltown, Cavill has relished the escape offered by his time as Geralt. For The Witcher’s hardcore fans – and are there any other kind? – he will remain a legend of the series. But the show, apparently, must go on.
‘The Witcher’ season three volume two is out now on Netflix
