Queen & Slim star Jodie Turner-Smith will front The Witcher prequel series

Set over one thousand years before the original show, The Witcher: Blood Origin will revolve around the elves of the Continent, before things got really bad.

The Witcher is a hit on Netflix, and you’d better believe the streaming service knows it. Showrunner Lauren Hissrich and her team are still working on the show’s second season, which will continue to adapt author Andrzej Sapkowski’s series of fantasy novels, but we’re also getting a prequel miniseries set long beforehand, back when the Continent was occupied mainly by elves whose worlds are about to be turned upside down.

And now, Netflix has released some official information about The Witcher: Blood Origin, starting by revealing the lead actor: Queen & Slim star Jodie Turner-Smith as Éile, “an elite warrior blessed with the voice of a goddess” who has left her position as Queen’s guardian to become a wandering musician. But when “a grand reckoning” comes to the Continent, she has put up her sword again.

"Set in an elven world 1200 years before the world of The Witcher, Blood Origin will tell a story lost to time – the creation of the first prototype Witcher, and the events that lead to the pivotal “conjunction of the spheres,” when the worlds of monsters, men, and elves merged to become one."

In The Witcher, the elves are a diminishing people, forced to hide in the mountains as humans push them out of their lands and live in the cities the elves built. So Blood Origin probably doesn’t have a super-happy ending.

We don’t know when Blood Origin will premiere, but it will be a six-episode limited series.

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