The Witcher showrunner on why the show isn’t ending with Henry Cavill

The third season of The Witcher premieres on Netflix next month, and it’s a big one; not only will it adapt Time of Contempt, often considered the best of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher novels, but it will mark the last time that Geralt Cavill plays the title roll of Geralt of Rivia; starting in season 4, Geralt will be played by Liam Hemsworth.

The news that Cavill would be exiting the show was surprising, since he was famously passionate about the role beforehand. Why would he leave partway through the show? At the end of the day, no one knows for sure (although we have our theories). Speaking to Total Film, showrunner Lauren Hissrich kept things vague: “It was time for him in his life to move on,” she said. “I think we’ve all been mourning this in our own way.”

In my opinion, Cavill’s performance is the best thing about The Witcher, so the idea of it existing without him is hard to get my head around. And Hissrich and company did have the option of ending the show when Cavill left, but obviously didn’t take that path. “[T]hat’s not something that we were willing to do,” Hissrich said. “There’s just too many stories left to tell.”

The Witcher showrunner: “It was time for [Henry Cavill] in his life to move on”

Another option would have been to bring in another witcher as a lead character, but that also didn’t feel right. “If we replaced Geralt with another Witcher, we would be going fully away from the books, and I don’t think that’s what anyone wanted either.”

Okay, because she set me up, I have to point out that Hissrich and her team have come under heavy fire from fans for changing the books; the second season, which is purportedly based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel Blood of Elves, is so different form the source material as to be unrecognizable, so I don’t think an argument about textual fidelity is very believable coming from Hissrich. It’s created some big narrative problems heading into the third season, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

For now, Hissrich and company are looking forward to working with Liam Hemsworth. “We’re all excited about Liam coming in,” she said. “He’s got enormous shoes to fill, but also has a lot of energy and a lot of excitement for it. It’s obviously a brand-new chapter for us. And there’s a lot of feelings involved. But at the end of the day, we love what we’re doing. So we’re gonna keep going.”

The third season of The Witcher premieres on Netflix on June 29. Another second and final block of episodes will follow on July 27.

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