If you had any doubts about Henry Cavill’s ability to channel Geralt in Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of The Witcher, then you should probably quell them, because guess what? He beat out 207 other Geralts to get the part. Yes, that’s right. No, that’s not a typo. TWO HUNDRED. AND. FREAKING SEVEN. GERALTS. (!!!)
That’s a whole lotta Geralt. Like, SO MUCH Geralt. Showrunner Lauren Hissrich told Entertainment Weekly on Thursday that the reason for all this Geralt was because Cavill (whom she described as a “huge fan of the process” who’d “read all of the books” and “played all of the games”) had approached her before the scripts were written.
“I met him at the very beginning of the process,” she told EW. “He said, ‘I would love to play this character.’ I said, ‘Henry, you’re amazing, but we haven’t even started thinking about casting yet.’ Then I met 207 other possible Geralts. And I came back to Henry at the end. He was my very first meeting and four months later I called him and asked if he was still interested and he was. The first time I met him I hadn’t even started writing the scripts yet. And once I started writing I couldn’t get Henry’s voice out of my head for the character. Looking at the final product, it’s really exciting. He embodies Geralt in a way that I don’t think anybody else could.”
This isn’t an exaggeration. Hissrich went on to say that Cavill played the part so well apparently that he didn’t even need lines to do it.
“In the first episode, I wrote Geralt with a lot of lines,” she told EW. “Henry shot them all, and in the edit we started pulling some of them out. Henry brings subtitles to this character, finding emotional resonance in small moments, and playing it in such a subtle way that you understand what the character is going through without necessarily having huge chunks of dialogue. By the time we got to episode 108 — the finale of the first season — we didn’t even shoot half the dialogue because we knew there was so much Henry could do with Geralt that didn’t require my words.”
So when will we get to see this magnificent, laconic Geralt in action–say, in trailer form? Hissrich was less forthcoming about that point, revealing only that she “cannot say” but “hope[s] it’s soon.”
Hmmmm. Mysterious! Considering The Witcher has landed a panel in Comic-Con’s fabled Hall H on Friday (set your alarm for 2:15 pm), this will be very soon, indeed.
Whom’st’d’ve YOU considered for the other 207 Geralts?
