One of The Witcher season 3’s most heartwarming moments was an accident

From the Thanedd coup to Ciri’s surviving in the desert, The Witcher season 3 featured plenty of memorable scenes, and not all of them involved monsters or action. The season 3 premiere, “Shaerrawedd,” gives Geralt (Henry Cavill), Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and Ciri (Freya Allan) time to live in hiding together as a family before the season splits them up, and it led to some beautiful interactions between them.

During the season premiere, these three spend a winter at a house in the middle of the forest beside a frozen lake. It’s here that we got one of the most heartwarming scenes of The Witcher‘s third season, when Yennefer and Ciri collapse laughing in a heap while trying to ice skate as Geralt watches from the nearby cabin.

As it turns out, this wonderful moment wasn’t planned at all.

Yennefer and Ciri’s ice skating tumble was an accident

The Witcher cast and crew got to talking about this improvised ice skating moment in the new Netflix documentary Making The Witcher: Season 3. “My favorite location, I think, was this lake in Italy where we shot this winter house. We see there, for the first time, that Ciri can skate, and tries to teach Yennefer how to skate,” said producer Tomek Baginski.

“Witcher fans love ice skating. It shows up in the books a lot in various ways. And we actually hadn’t paid any homage to this yet,” added showrunner Lauren Hissrich. “And so, I still remember when Freya Allan read the pages, and it has Ciri doing, like, elaborate Olympic jumps on the ice, and she was like ‘Wait. What?'”

As daunted as Allan was to film the ice skating scenes, Chalotra was even more nervous. “I can barely walk on the floor. I’d have loved to have known what everyone was thinking as they were watching us prance around on ice,” she said, laughing.

It’s true that Ciri ice skates in The Witcher novels, so this was a great little detail to see make the leap to the show. However, filming it was difficult, which is what led to the accidental spill, as Allan recalled:

"I asked for a lot of lessons because I want to be like an Olympic ice skater by the end, which, of course, I was not. And then we got there on the day, and it was, like, plastic ice. It wasn’t even real ice, so we couldn’t even properly move.In fact, in one of the takes, we just fell on top of each other."

Fortunately, Chalotra and Allan thought the fall was hilarious, which was just what the scene needed. “Freya ends up on top of Anya, and they’re just laughing, and someone has to roll off, they can’t get back up,” said Hissrich. “And it was such a… just a gorgeous, real moment that we ended up putting it in the show.”

“It was exciting to see this little… little detail which shows that we tried not to forget about all the things which are important for our characters,” said Baginski.

All eight episodes of The Witcher season 3 are streaming now on Netflix. Season 4 is expected to begin filming in early 2024.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels