Henry Cavill will play the Witcher in Netflix’s new series

A few weeks back, actor Henry Cavill was doing press for Mission: Impossible — Fallout when IGN asked him what video games he’d be playing lately. “The Witcher 3,” replied Cavill. “I just replayed all the way through. Love that game. Really good game.”

Interesting. Would Cavill be interested in playing Geralt of Rivia, the main character, in Netflix’s upcoming Witcher series?

"Absolutely. Yeah, that would be an amazing role…The books are amazing. The books are really, really good… The books I started reading, and they are well worth a read."

At the time, this just seemed like Cavill being a bit of a dork, which was nothing new; when director Zach Snyder called to tell the actor he’d landed the role of Superman in Man of Steel, Cavill almost didn’t answer because he was busy playing World of Warcraft. Now it seems like Cavill was preparing, as Entertainment Weekly reports he will indeed play Geralt in Netflix’s show.

Netflix’s show will be based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s series of books, which were already adapted by CD Projekt Red as a tremendously successful series of video games, The Witcher 3 being the breakout hit. (Bizarrely, Sapkowski thinks the games are cutting into sales of his books, which is like George R.R. Martin accusing Game of Thrones of driving down sales for A Song of Ice and Fire, which is nuts, but that’s a topic for another day.) Detailed and richly imagined, the novels should provide Netflix plenty of fodder. The synopsis describes the series as “an epic tale of fate and family.”

"Geralt of Rivia, a solitary monster hunter, struggles to find his place in a world where people often prove more wicked than beasts. But when destiny hurtles him toward a powerful sorceress, and a young princess with a dangerous secret, the three must learn to navigate the increasingly volatile Continent together."

Cavill is a pretty big get for Netflix, which will need all the firepower it can gather to compete in a post-Game of Thrones landscape where everybody is kicking in a new high-budget fantasy show. Amazon is preparing shows based on The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time, Disney is readying a live-action Star Wars show, etc.

Daredevil and The Defenders producer Lauren Schmidt Hissrich will serve as showrunner on The Witcher, with former Game of Thrones cinematographer Alik Sakharov directing four of the eight episodes in the show’s first season. There’s no release date as of yet, but with casting underway, 2020 seems like a safe bet.

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