While Netflix is hard at work getting The Witcher‘s season two ready for its debut later this year, it’s also prepping work on a spinoff project, The Witcher: Blood Origins. Yesterday, Netflix announced by way of The Hollywood Reporter that it has cast Michelle Yeoh in a major role.
The streaming service announced last year that it had greenlit a six-episode prequel miniseries about the origins of the Witchers—magical monster hunters—set 1200 years before the events of the main series. The series will show off how “the worlds of monsters, men and elves merged into one, and [how] the first Witcher came to be,” and doesn’t appear to be based on any of Andrzej Sapkowski’s books.
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Netflix has just begun casting for the project: Earlier this year, it brought in Jodie Turner-Smith (Syfy’s Nightflyers) to play Éile, an “an elite warrior blessed with the voice of a goddess.” A couple of months later, it cast Laurence O’Fuarain (Vikings, Game of Thrones) to play Fjall, a member of a “clan of warriors sworn to protect a King,” and someone who “carries a deep scar within, the death of a loved one who fell in battle trying to save him.”
Yeoh will play Scían, the “very last of her nomadic tribe of sword-elves,” who not only also carries some deep, personal losses, but is also an expert swordswoman who is on a quest to recover a stolen, sacred sword.
As THR points out, Yeoh is trading one franchise for another: She’s best known at the moment for playing two versions of Philippa Georgiou in Star Trek: Discovery (pictured above), and at one point, there was talk of her leading a spinoff series about the infamous Section 31, but those plans seem to have stalled a bit as CBS’s Star Trek franchise pivoted to Picard. Should that series still happen, Blood Origins is only six episodes, so presumably, Yeoh could return somewhere down the road.
Netflix hasn’t said when the series will debut. It’s also planning an animated film set in the same world.
