First image of Laurence Fishburne as Regis in The Witcher season 4

It's a big time for Netflix's monster-hunting fantasy show The Witcher. The series is currently filming its fourth season, which will be the first time we see Liam Hemsworth onscreen as Geralt of Rivia instead of Henry Cavill, who played the titular witcher for the first three seasons. It's also a large turning point in the story as told in the books by Andrzej Sapkowski, with Geralt setting off on a globe-trotting adventure to find his adoptive daughter, Ciri (Freya Allan).

Along the way, Geralt will assemble a group of stalwart companions, known as his hansa. We've already met a few of them, like Milva (Meng'er Zhang) and Jaskier (Joey Batey), but next season we'll see the group properly come together with a few new additions. The most high-profile of those is Regis, a barber-surgeon with a mysterious past played by The Matrix's Laurence Fishburne.

Now, the first image of Fishburne in costume has surfaced from The Witcher set. This comes courtesy of UnBoxPHD, a scooper who documented a ton of leaks for House of the Dragon season 2 last year. Apparently there is no holding back the power of UnBoxPHD, because now they're posting images from The Witcher and The Sandman. Below, you can see this image of Fishburne in costume as Regis, and it's...something:

For the love of god, tell me that's not the final wig for Regis?

Okay, so on the whole, Fishburne's costume looks solid. Regis is a beloved character from both The Witcher books and video games; he's one of the main companions for the final Witcher 3 expansion Blood & Wine, which sees Geralt go to the magical duchy of Toussaint. It's important for the show to do Regis right, and there's little doubt that an actor of Fishburne's caliber could be great in the part.

However, there is one aspect of Fishburne's costume that's making me grimace, and that's the wig. It's...not very good. Hopefully this is just a trial run and the kinks are being worked out; don't forget, this is a leak and not an official image, and The Witcher has a track record of improving the wigs from first look to final product. Do we all remember the flowing, elven-style locks that Cavil was sporting in his first image as Geralt?

That said, the style of this wig brings up a weird point. The Witcher is an adaptation of the book series, but it often draws on the style of the video games developed by CD Project Red, which are sort of a sequel to the novels. Sometimes, the visual realization of characters in the games is so close to their book descriptions that it's uncanny, such as with Sigismund Dijkstra. But the games take their fair share of liberties, sometimes emphasizing physical traits which weren't a huge talking point in the novels.

So far as I recall, Regis' sideburns are one such example; in Regis' first appearance in the books, Sapkowski doesn't make a huge to-do about the barber-surgeon's hair. The Witcher hasn't always tried to be slavish to the look of the games or books — Dijkstra, for example, is very different in appearance and personality in the show, where he's played by Outlander veteran Graham McTavish — but it looks like they may have drawn a line in the sand with Regis' wig. To my eye it looks a lot like they tried to recreate the hair of the character from Blood & Wine, which looks silly on an actual human like Fishburne:

I'm not actually worried about the crimes being done to Laurence Fishburne's head at this point, just bemused. Hopefully whenever we get an actual first look at him, it'll be much better than this leak.

Filming on The Witcher season 4 is expected to run until later this year. Our best guess is that it'll be on your TV sometime in 2025.

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h/t Redanian Intelligence