The Witcher: Henry Cavill rolls around in puddles, reads Reddit to play Geralt

The Witcher is coming back! After a well-received first season on Netflix, the show is one of the first to gear up to return to production following a coronavirus-mandated shutdown.

One of the big reasons The Witcher debuted as strongly as it did, I think, was Henry Cavill’s performance in the lead role of Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster hunter who tries — and usually fails — to keep his mind on the money and stay out of messy human entanglements. Cavill was a fan of the Witcher video games from CD Projekt Red before joining the show, and he was clearly happy to do the homework. “I do think it carries more weight if an actor is well-versed in the lore,” Cavill told Vanity Fair. “And it’s certainly beneficial to my performance if I know the world.”

The Witcher show is based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, not the games, but there’s obviously a lot in common, and Cavill wanted to “represent Geralt, my character, as accurately to the books as I possibly could.”

But that could be tricky considering that the show is a bit more of an ensemble piece than the books, focusing more on the perspectives of Yennefer — Geralt’s on-again, off-again sorceress girlfriend — and Ciri, his eventual protégé in the witching way. In the books, we get to hear Geralt’s inner thoughts, but onscreen, we don’t have that privilege, and Geralt isn’t one to talk too much about what he’s thinking and feeling.

“I decided that less was more,” Cavill said about his experience. “I wanted to really show Geralt’s perceptiveness, his intelligence, his old age, his wisdom, because he’s an old man, essentially, as far as we’re concerned. That, for me, was hopefully going to give the audience—it’s almost like they’re trying to crack a cipher when it comes to Geralt. So when he does say something, it means something. He’s not shouting from the rooftops, and yet he is as large as a house of a character.”

It’s great to see that Cavill is really invested in carefully crafting his performance. And it went beyond the voice. Cavill went above and beyond to make sure his take on the character was convincing. “The costumers were, towards the end, quite horrified with me,” he said. “Before takes I would look at myself and say, ‘We need more dirt on me.’ They’d come up to me with this tiny little—it’s like a pair of tights rolled up into a ball, with some dust in, and they’d sort of pat it on me. And I’d say, ‘Yeah, guys, that’s not enough.’ So I’d go stand out in the rain. Sometimes I’d roll around in puddles. I would just try and get as much of the world on me, so this character looked like he had lived within it.”

Stop a moment and picture the guy who played Superman rolling around in puddles, just so he could get the right look for the character. That’s dedication.

Cavill was also particular about Geralt’s cat-like irises. When his eye was scratched during filming and his eye technician insisted his specialized contacts come out, he was resistant, since he thought the other actors wouldn’t react to his performance as believably. “[T]hat color that we eventually landed on was perfect for me, because when I walked up to people, they were a bit like, ‘Oh, I feel like I can’t look at you’—but then they couldn’t look away at the same time. And that was the exact response I wanted. He’s a mutant who goes around killing monsters, and there’s stories of him killing bunches of the people in villages. I wanted him to have that fear factor as well as that ‘but I can’t look away’ factor.”

And this is all before we get to the fight scenes:

"I didn’t want [Geralt] to have his acting moments and then his fight moments and them not to be connected. I wanted him to look like a living weapon, and I hope I achieved that with the Blaviken piece. At the same time, he can still hold a conversation and try and save someone’s life while they’re trying to kill him. You see it especially with the Renfri fight. He’s on the defensive with a couple of moves to try and put her on the back foot, and she doesn’t listen and she keeps on pressing the attack. Eventually you see the point where he realizes that she won’t stop, that he will die because she is quick enough. So he presses the attack. The story of who he is as a character is told so physically there."

So clearly this guy is serious about doing justice to the character. And even after all that, if it means his performance can be even better, he’s willing to go somewhere that can be less hospitable than any monster’s lair: Reddit.

“I know that there are mixed opinions out there as well, which I really thrive upon reading as well,” Cavill said. “For me, it’s vital to go about and read—I’m on all the Reddit forums. I’m reading all the reviews. I’m literally trying to get everyone’s information. Some of it is not useful, and other criticisms are incredibly useful. I take it all in, and I look forward to bringing it even closer and closer to Sapkowski’s writing.”

Anyone willing to learn from Reddit is someone worth watching in my book. Hopefully The Witcher season 2 can get back to shooting and release before too much time passes.

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