The Witcher is casting an experienced killer for season 2

With The Witcher getting back to work, we’re seeing more audition videos. Is this a character fans recognize from the books?

The Witcher is coming back. The first season of Netflix’s fantasy drama was a hit, and after a stall courtesy of the coronavirus, production on season 2 is revving up again. We might not get the new episodes as early as we’d hoped — not this year, surely — but they’re coming along.

The first season of the show covered the first two books in Andrzej Sapkowski’s series: The Last Wish and The Sword of Destiny. Those two books are interesting because they’re not so much novels as they are short story collections; showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich had to find a common thread to make them more serialized.

But with season 2, the show dives into the “Witcher saga” proper, which begins with the novel Blood of Elves. That means new characters, like Kim Bodnia playing Geralt’s mentor Vesemir.

But we don’t know everyone who’s joining the cast, and there are some characters from the books as yet unaccounted for. Fansite Redanian Intelligence came across a Witcher audition tape for an actor named Edward Rowe, who was auditioning to play a character simply named “D” in the script. The tape has since been taken down, but the transcript of the scene he was reading remains. See if it rings any bells:

"Man: “I’m sorry, D. I don’t know what happened.”D: “You fell asleep on you watch, that’s what happened. You made it through your first battle without shitting your kacks, you’ve earned a night’s rest.”Man: “Does is ever get easier?“D: “Staying awake?“Man: “Killing.”D: “When you were a boy and your father sent you to plow the field, your hands hurt first, didn’t they? Then the blisters, callus and the ache moved to your back, then you got strong and the ache moved to your head to the everyday monotony of putting your blade to the ground and tilling the never ending roads of dirt. Killing is no different than any other job. The trick is to know that the difficulty never goes away. It just migrates, becomes a duller kind of heart. One you can learn to ignore.”"

“D” is pretty clearly a code name, which you figure they wouldn’t have to use unless they covering for the fact that the character is someone fans might recognize, right? We don’t anything for sure, but Rowe could be reading for the role of Rience, a mage sent to find Princess Ciri (Freya Allan) when she’s lost after the fall of Cintra.

In the first season, the knight Cahir (Eamon Farren) was on Ciri’s trail. She’ll find that kind of thing happens to her a lot. Sorry, Ciri.

Anyway, Rience is most definitely a killer, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to be him. But the Continent doesn’t lack for Men Who Have Seen Too Much, so this could also be an original character. We’ll keep an eye out for more details.

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