Stick a fork in your witcher, because after nearly eight years, Netflix’s The Witcher is done.
Okay, that’s not exactly true. Production wrapped on the fifth and final season of the TV series adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s books the night of September 30, and when IGN checked in with showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich the next day, she was “working on fumes.”
But there’s still a long journey to go, not least of which is the upcoming premiere of The Witcher Season 4 on October 30. So while Hissrich is putting a close on one part of her life, thanks to some key changes behind the scenes, this is actually the beginning of a much bigger story, with one of the biggest question marks in recent entertainment history: how will Liam Hemsworth fit in the shoes worn in the previous three seasons by actor Henry Cavill?
To take a step back, in late 2022, Netflix dropped a bomb. Cavill, who portrayed the monosyllabic monster hunter Geralt on the hit fantasy series for three seasons, was leaving the show before Season 4. In his place, Hemsworth, best known for playing Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games film series, would be stepping into his wig and leather pants. It was a shocker for fans of the series – but as it turns out, it was a huge surprise for Hemsworth as well.
“I was on set of shooting a film called Land of Bad, this is at the end of 2022, and my agent just asked me, said, ‘You know, this one's kind of come out of nowhere, but how do you feel about stepping on as The Witcher,’” Hemsworth told IGN, “and I was shocked.”
While Hemsworth had played the video games, particularly Witcher 3, which he calls “one of the best games of all time,” he was thrown by the “odd situation.” So he started digging into the books, “had a look at the show… And then I had a conversation with Lauren.”
On Hissrich’s end, there was no question about Hemsworth being the right choice – and in fact, he was her first call once Cavill decided to leave the series, for both mutually agreed upon creative differences, and other opportunities (Cavill at the time thought he was returning to the role of Superman, though the two events have never been explicitly tied together).
“When we were looking at who potentially could fill the shoes of Geralt, there is a physicality that has to be present,” Hissrich explained. “You need someone who you can imagine can excel at these action scenes, who has such a physical presence that they could be both intimidating in the story, but also, Geralt has a huge emotional side as well… What I really loved about Liam's work that I had seen is that he was able to organically blend those two things. He didn't have physical scenes and then emotional scenes. He was able to really carry this specific, I guess I call it soul. He has a soul that he brings into the role… To have that present even through action scenes when he's fighting monsters, and it's the same thing that's present when he's having conversations with Ciri or with Yennefer, that was a really special thing that we were able to capture. And when I had watched some of his work, specifically going back to Hunger Games, that's something that I felt from him.”
Once Hissrich got Hemsworth on the phone, she talked him through the whole character’s journey, laying out where Geralt was headed in the final two seasons of the series – which is ultimately what sold the actor. “I thought it would be a really great opportunity to dig into this very complex character that, particularly in this part of the story, is dealing with so much,” Hemsworth recalled. “He's not used to being in a place of doubt and struggle and fear.”
What Hemsworth is referring to is the climax of Season 3, which left the tight-knit de facto family of Geralt, the child of surprise and witcher-in-training Ciri (Freya Allan), and powerful sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra) scattered to different sides of The Continent. Particularly in Geralt’s case, he was grievously injured during a battle with a dark sorcerer, Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), who shockingly betrayed, well, everyone towards the end of the third season.
While Geralt was ostensibly healed by Yennefer and headed off in pursuit of Ciri, who he thinks is in the clutches of arch-villain Emhyr (Bart Edwards), alongside bard Jaskier (Joey Batey) and archer Milva (Meng'er Zhang) – she’s not with Emhyr at all. Ciri is actually avoiding her destiny with a group of thieves called The Rats. And unfortunately, magical health care only covers so much… Geralt is still very much weaker and more injured than he ever has been, not to mention the psychic wounds he sustained losing to Vilgefortz.
It’s a plot that continues throughout Season 4, and this chance to put his own stamp on Geralt and build him back up again was the deciding factor in getting Hemsworth on board. Still, Hissrich is stunned that it worked. “It was a surprising call for him,” she said. “But for us, he felt like such a natural choice. And I'm still kind of gobsmacked that we got him.”
It’s one thing to hire Hemsworth for the role vacated by Cavill; another thing to actually have him play the role on screen, which is not as simple as switching one actor in and continuing onward, particularly in the writing process.
“It absolutely impacts things,” Hissrich said. “What this new voice would sound like, and the delivery of the speech, and all of those things that were untested.”
Hissrich specifically called out Geralt’s “deep, gravelly voice,” which somehow needed to be switched from the British Cavill to the Australian Hemsworth. “How does that start to translate?” Hissrich continued. “Even once we wrote all the scripts, once we started filming them, we started making adjustments to make sure that things sounded more natural coming out of Liam's mouth.”
One of the biggest changes? During the Cavill era, Hissrich noted that they went “back and forth between having Geralt be the strong, silent type – that was really what happened in Season One. He was written fairly verbose, like he is in the books, and we ended up trimming it back to the bare minimum, and we let him run scenes with his presence. And then in Seasons Two and Three, we started to build back more into the character that we had written in the first place, who is a little bit more of an intellectual and who really does love to debate things.”
While Geralt will never be characterized as a chatterbox, Season 4 does find the character opening up and finding “a really happy medium between the two. We brought back some grunting and some sighing and some humming and certainly some ‘fucks’ now and then. But we also allowed Geralt, specifically, in these emotional moments, to have lengthier… I don't want to call them speeches, but lengthier conversations with his comrades.”
Those comrades are Geralt’s “hansa,” a sort of D&D party that includes the aforementioned bard and archer, as well as new characters like Laurence Fishburne’s Regis, an enigmatic vampire Geralt meets early in Season 4.
Watch this exclusive clip from The Witcher: Season 4 featuring Liam Hemsworth and Laurence Fishburne:
“That also changed Geralt's voice, because suddenly he's not just talking to Ciri, Yennefer and Jaskier,” Hissrich said. “He's interacting with Milva. He meets Regis for the first time. Regis, for instance, brings an entire moral and ethical center, and pushes Geralt on a lot of things, and suddenly these were conversations that we'd never been able to have on the show before. So it changed a lot. But it's really also innate to what Geralt is going through in Season Four. He is in a more emotional, vulnerable place. So we were able to adjust [for] this new actor coming in, but also new colors for the character that felt very organic to the story.”
Even with these new colors and motivations, Cavill’s performance was very much on Hemsworth’s mind when he stepped on set – or rather, how to move past the previous performance, and make the role his own. Helpfully, while we won’t get into specifics, The Witcher Season 4 does address these changes right off in a way that both gave Hemsworth pause, while ultimately allowing him to move forward with the rest of the season(s), as well.
“We tied a few of the earlier things that Henry had done when he was portraying the character,” Hemsworth said, “to the beginning of me taking over the role… I didn't want to directly try to redo anything that he'd done. I initially had a little bit of hesitation towards that. And then after some talks with Lauren and the writers, we felt like it was a way of throwing back to some earlier things that we've seen The Witcher do already, and saying, ‘Here's my version of it, and we're going to move forward with it.’ … Once I got on set and really understood where Henry left the role, and I understood where I was picking it up, it was no longer about having to think about that. It was just where I'm going and how I got here. And then what I do is try and be present and focus on what my motivation is moving forward. So as long as I understood emotionally where this character was at this point in the story, my job going forward became the same as it as it ever is: I’m just focusing on the direction I'm moving in, and trying to understand why I'm going that way.”
One big difference between Cavill and Hemsworth that becomes more and more apparent over the course of Season 4, though… Whereas Cavill portrayed Geralt mostly as stoic, Hemsworth’s Geralt, get this: smiles.
“Liam has such a cheeky grin, and it is one of the very first things that we actually talked about when we had our first Zoom ever,” Hissrich recalled. “One of the things that he talked a lot about was for this dry wit that Geralt has, and that, in all honesty, he didn't feel like was very present in the show. It was something he asked if I would be open to seeing more of.”
“I wanted it to be able to show these moments of him opening up a little more,” Hemsworth added. “My interpretation of this character is Geralt is a deeply empathetic person. As much as he's lived a very isolated life, and is reluctant to open up to people or be vulnerable with people, apart from, say, Ciri and Yen and Jaskier… [At] this point in the story, we're really seeing him go through a lot of changes. So I wanted to earn those moments. Because when we find him, he's dealing with doubt. He's struggling. He's really unsure about himself… He's injured right now, so he's unsure whether, even if he does find Ciri, if he's actually going to be able to save her, if he has the strength and the ability to save her. It is purely the fact that he actually is able to be vulnerable with his friends and meet this chosen family that he's able to lean on them and find the courage and find the strength… This idea of chosen family is what really pushes him forward and motivates him to go on.”
“There is nothing better than when Geralt finds joy and humor, especially in the people that he's with,” Hissrich said. “We have a producer, Tomasz Baginski, who is Polish and who has spoken from the very beginning about how important it is that even in these stories of war and violence and misery, that people continue living their daily lives, and that it's normal to joke, to deal with trauma, it's normal to have good conversations, to smile, even when things are going to shit. And so that was really great to see in dailies again, that we were able to bring that flavor back.”
It isn’t just Geralt who has a fresh new outlook on life this season… The whole show feels renewed, from less of a morose, grey wash to brighter lighting overall, and a softer, often much funnier touch with the source material. And each of the three tracks running – Geralt with his hansa, Ciri with The Rats, and Yennefer gunning directly for Vilgefortz – has clear stakes, and a clear mission for the cast of characters… Even if they hit plenty of speed bumps along the way to their respective goals.
“Organically, this is where the stories were heading, no matter what,” Hissrich said. “We knew that by the end of Season Three that Ciri, Yennefer, and Geralt were each going to be on their own paths. They had to separate. That is what happens in the books. It just felt like the natural step for our show, too.”
As you might be able to intuit, that does mean Geralt is off on his own for much of Season 4, almost building up a new cast around him – and same for each of our main trio. According to Hissrich, Allan calls Ciri “a little more punk than rock and roll” this season, as she gets to be a rebellious teen for the first time. “She's going through some harrowing stuff, but at the same time, she's also there's a levity to that character that we haven't seen before,” Hissrich added.
And as for Hemsworth, he and his hansa “hit it off from the beginning.” Though he initially starts with the characters of Milva and Jaskier, the party grows, and “we all had a lot of fun working together. There's some real characters in the group. There was a lot of joking and laughing and bonding and whatnot, along with Geralt being reluctant to open up and really accept new people.”
Digging into things further, Hissrich continued that, “Fantasy oftentimes, and The Witcher fell into this… It becomes very earnest. Everything is carried with the weight of the world. And personally, when I turn on the television at night after work to watch something, you do want to have moments of hope and optimism. You do want to have moments of beauty. It was so important to bring that back to the Witcher world.”
Hissrich recalls very early in the process of making the show, around 2018, visiting a friend who was playing the games, just watching them play and being struck by “how beautiful the games were… There was a specific scene where they were at Lakeside at sunset. And I thought, I want to make sure to keep that alive in the show, to see how beautiful the world is.”
It may have taken a few seasons to get there, but this new, brighter, more beautiful look at the world “is purposeful, and I think that it does lend to a refresh for the season,” Hissrich said.
There’s another aspect of the series that has been refreshed over time: the show’s view towards nudity and sexuality. While The Witcher Season One was often characterized by scenes featuring wall to wall nude bodies and blatant sex scenes, that’s (mostly) gone away by Season 4. While there’s still at least one tasteful non-nude sex scene, and some brief nudity in other episodes, this was a purposeful decision to head in another direction from Hissrich.
“This is a personal decision that I made, that we then made in the writer's room,” Hissrich explained. While acknowledging that there’s “a ton of sex” in the games and the books, and that Season One had its fair share of it, Hissrich didn’t want to use sex as a backdrop in a scene just to make a scene “a little bit more scandalous.”
“However, I found watching Season One that there was a great disparity between female nudity and male nudity, and that, in fact, there seemed to be a lot of nude female bodies and not many nude male ones. And it started to feel really unfair. That was the point that we pulled everything back, because honestly, it was a decision that I made in Season One, and I wasn't happy with how I made it. So that's been something that we've tried to course correct throughout. We have found a nice place where I don't think people show up to The Witcher to see a bunch of nudity anymore. They show up for the stories.”
Along with a refresh comes new characters, such as Regis, played by Fishburne, who Hissrich noted “wanted to come on and have a lot of fun… He was very intrigued by being able to put on all the prosthetics to play this genre character that he had never played before. There's a certain flamboyance to Regis that he was really excited to embrace. And for us, it was really about playing with these tropes of what it means to be a vampire, what it means to, quote, unquote, be a monster, and how oftentimes he's the character who feels like he has the most humanity. Laurence is a delight. I had no idea what to expect. He's a really kind person, and he was having, I think, the time of his life.”
Hemsworth, meanwhile, seemed to be also having the time of his life with Fishburne on set, saying that he’s “a massive fan of his.” While Hemsworth recalled being thrown into a “quite heavy two-hander” with him right off, “he is so cool, calm and collected all the time, and what I loved was that he's been doing this most of his life, and he's still so excited to turn up on set and work with other actors and explore and dig in. He still carries that childlike energy of being nervous on the first day.”
In fact, that energy — which Hemsworth says he brings every day when he’s working, even when he’s being “internal and stoic” to play Geralt – was a bonding point between the two actors. “Him and I would always joke in the morning about how little sleep we got,” Hemsworth said. “He'd come up to me at the start of the day, and he'd be like, ’Liam, how many did you get?’ I'd be like, ‘I don't know, two or three?’ He's like, ‘me too. Let's go, baby. Let's go.’ And away we'd go.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Sharlto Copley as Leo Bonhart. Fans of the source material will know Bonhart is a bounty hunter who constantly wears witcher medallions – which he claims he got from slaying witchers. While we won’t say much more about how Bonhart plays into the story, suffice to say he’s not quite on the side of the angels. And in fact, Bonhart might be the most reprehensible bad guy the show has ever produced.
“Sharlto, when we first hired him, he told me that he doesn't love to play villains,” Hissrich said. “He said, ‘I'm going to lean into this, though.’”
Hissrich relayed an anecdote about Copley that explains just how far he leaned into playing a baddie. In Season 4, Copley asked for fake spit, because “he wanted to spit on someone and then wanted to wipe it off their face.” While you’re not allowed to do that, and it wasn’t scripted, Copley convinced the crew by showing them what he planned to do with the spit – you’ll see exactly what happens in Season 4 – and proved that yes, he’s bad to the bone. Or at least, the spit.
“The best thing to do with Sharlto is wind him up and let him go,” Hissrich continued. “His performance is so authentic. He is so in that character when he shows up on set with his bald cap and his teeth, and we have a lot of moments with him that were actually unscripted, that we have ended up putting in the cuts because he so leaned into the perverseness of Leo, and the idea that just how much he enjoys being an unredemptive character, which I don't think The Witcher ever had before. We talk a lot about the shades of gray, and there are no shades of gray with Leo Bonhart. He's pure evil.”
Oh, and then there’s the cursing parrot. Part of Geralt’s hansa (sort of), Field Marshal Windbag is a nasty, swearing bird who arguably steals the season out from under the cast. But even with his scant scene time, the production wanted to do more with FMW, and could not.
“We would lean into the bird so much more if we could,” Hissrich said. “Here's the truth about Field Marshal Windbag is that parrots can't be around heavy smoke or heavy atmosphere, which is, you look at our show, is nothing but fires burning and heavy atmosphere being pumped, and it's actually dangerous to the birds. We realized that we were having to isolate scenes that would otherwise be in the woods, or be in this environment that should be a little bit spookier. We were having to film it a certain way, because we had Field Marshal Windbag. And very quickly we realized we had to use him in small bursts, and then otherwise, let the drama of our show rule where we were shooting.”
FMW does briefly take center stage, as does the rest of Geralt’s hansa, in the season’s fifth episode, which Hissrich calls “one of my favorite episodes we've ever done.” In it, we get to see the group sitting around a fire telling stories. And while to say more would be to get into heavy spoilers, Hissirch did add that, “It was really important with this hansa, this group that is traveling with Geralt, that he is still pushing away. It becomes a really important plot point that Geralt understands that they're not just there to support him, they're all on their own individual journeys as well, and that they're there because they need to be in their lives.”
As for Hemsworth, his main memory of the episode is that it smelled like fish. “We started part of that episode out in the woods, and then once we got into the rest of it, we're sitting around a campfire in a studio which ended up smelling a lot like rotten fish,” Hemsworth recalled. “I think they actually left some fish in the studio over the weekend when we're shooting it. So when we came back, the whole studio smelled like rotten fish. And then they had chunks of fish in this lukewarm water that we were sipping out of… The director had asked me to sip out of it, and I put it to my [face] and I smelled it… It was fresh fish, [but] this stuff, it was mixed with the rotten fish smell. And then this lukewarm, fishy water that the director asked me to sip. I just put it to my lips, and I was like, ‘yeah, that's a no.’”
As for the season as a whole, one thing fans might want to be alerted to: you are not ready for the places it goes – and specifically, how it ends. For Hemsworth, without spoiling anything, he did feel that where Geralt ends up at the end of Season 4 is “true to the books… He goes through an enormous journey of change and struggle and pain, but ultimately finds this group of people that he really cares about and really care about him.”
That’s only half the story, though. Literally.
“We wrote both seasons back to back, we filmed them both back to back,” Hissrich said on Seasons 4 and 5. “They're coming out as two separate entities, but they really are one long story. What was interesting for us is that most seasons end on, seasons one, two three, they end on an up note. You finally have the family reunited. We made a choice at the end of Season Four to have it end on quite a downbeat, to put people in this position where things have almost never looked worse. Because for us, that was the only way to split this journey in half. And then in Season Five, start Geralt up again. Because really, once you start Season Four, it's all about reuniting this family, and it takes 16 episodes to get there. We definitely wanted to make sure that we felt like we had individual journeys. But truly, all five seasons, it really is just one big story.”
“There’s a really good payoff to the series,” Hemsworth teased. “And it feels complete.”
While we await the release of the eight episodes of Season 4, and Season 5 has an expected eight episodes as well to be released sometime in the future (though it is expected to be in 2026), Hissrich and Hemsworth are basking in the exhausting release of finishing work that took years of their lives.
“This has been such an enormous part of my life now for eight years,” Hissrich said. “I sold the pilot eight years ago… When you [bring] out a television show, [you don’t know] how long it's going to last, how it's going to impact its audience, or our culture. Going into Season One, we were so proud of what we had done, and then you cross your fingers and hope that people like it. I remember hearing ‘Toss a Coin to Your Witcher’ on one of my kids' YouTube channels, and I was like, ‘That's so funny. That's this show.’ It's been such a stunning experience and has changed my life in every single way. And I wouldn't trade it for the world. It's such an honor to get to do a show for this long, to build that kind of family out. We've had almost the same crew throughout, throughout the entire run. It is a testament to how much everyone wants to be there and how hard everyone works. So it's both celebratory and, of course, heartbreaking in a way that it's over.”
As for Hemsworth, when we talked two days on from the final shot, he noted that he was “feeling a little more normal today,” after taking care of some business and a wrap party the day after. “Yesterday, I felt like my my my brain and my body just shut down,” Hemsworth said, “and I basically laid in bed for about 24 hours, going through all the things that have happened this year and last year, and it all feels kind of surreal and weirdly like it all happened in a blink of an eye, and kind of dream like. But so much happened, and I'm really grateful for the experience it was. It was a demanding job and required a lot of focus and discipline. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint.”
While Hissrich wouldn’t spoil the final moment of the series – we suggested perhaps it’s Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri jumping up and high-fiving in a freeze frame, to which Hissrich joked, “obviously, with neon colors around them, and a pop music track, like we always do. Yes, you've nailed it” – she did recall the “fantastic” feeling of that final moment on set.
“It truly is such a celebration,” Hissrich said. “You hear the final cut, and everyone is sitting and waiting to hear that's a wrap. And there are a ton of tears, pure exhaustion. For me, I woke up this morning and I thought, ‘I'm not going to Longcross [Studios in the UK]. What am I doing?’ The adrenaline has been carrying us for so long, but it's a really unique experience… It was really emotional.”
Hemsworth felt that the last scene was “surreal,” and recalled talking to Chalotra while filming an action scene on the final day, where the actress asked him how he felt. “I was like, ‘I weirdly feel really anxious about the ending’,” Hemsworth said. “But also I was looking forward to being able to just rest, because I felt like the last few months in particular, I've been running on fumes and adrenaline and not a lot of sleep. But we got through it together… I'm thankful I got to work with Anya and Freya and Joe Beatty and Laurence Fishburne and so many great actors that I was really blown away by how much they brought to their characters individually, and how much they they really cared about this world, and they cared about their journey in this world, and really welcomed me into it and supported me through this wild ride.”
And looking back, three years later, on making the choice to pick up the role from Cavill, Hemsworth feels like joining The Witcher was “absolutely” the right decision.
“I had a wonderful experience,” Hemsworth explained. “It was a unique situation, to come into a show that someone else has been doing for a period of time… There was obviously a lot of talk from fans and opinions, and I think that's great. This show has very passionate fans that care about these characters and care about this world. I appreciate that. I understand it. I'm a fan of the show. I'm a fan of the characters, which is why it wasn't lost on me that there was a responsibility to do it right, to do it justice. I poured everything I had into this character. I wanted it to feel grounded. I wanted it to feel authentic. I really hope the audience enjoys the character and my interpretation of it… I got to work with so many great actors and play this wonderfully complex character that has a huge fan base. And I hope people come along for the ride. I feel very grateful to have had this experience.”
Despite these kind words, there is one aspect of The Witcher that starring in the show has ruined for Hemsworth: his original fandom, the video games.
“When I first got to London, I was like, I'll take a look at it,” Hemsworth said of booting up The Witcher games for the umpteenth time. “I had just started playing [Geralt] and I was like, ‘I don't know how many minutes or hours I can spend walking around as this character right now whilst shooting the show at the same time.’ So I had a quick look at it and it reminded me of what I experienced years ago when I played it.”
Added Hemsworth, laughing, “But yeah, it didn't feel like it was going to be hugely helpful to my experience at that time.”
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