Henry Cavill leaps from Superman to antihero in Netflix’s ‘The Witcher’
To those who bask in his chiseled looks, superheroic demeanor and English accent, Henry Cavill is a god. This we learned at a recent Netflix press conference in which the English actor — otherwise known as The Man of Steel, and Tom Cruise’s sidekick in Mission Impossible: Fallout — sat down to a room of adoring female fans as well as avid fanboys at the Conrad Hotel in Manila.
Cavill plays Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter in a mythical land known as The Continent, in the Netflix Original Series The Witcher, based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy books. With a wig reminiscent of a scruffier Legolas, or even Daenerys from another mythical land, hazel eyes (that turn jet black when he’s in witcher mode) and a buff physique about equal to Conan the Barbarian’s, Cavill seems born for this role. He’s got the deep gravelly voice, excellent physical skills, and a great way with deadpan dialogue. Though Geralt seems to end up with a different female companion in each episode (Cavill jokes that his character is “a lover, and a fighter”), it’s amusing that his most, er, stable relationship seems to be with his horse. Exiting a whorehouse in Episode 3, Geralt quips to his waiting steed: “Don’t judge me.” (The steed doesn’t appear to be doing any judging.)
Fantasy is nothing new for Netflix, but this series, mostly shot in Budapest, has a rabid built-in fan base: in addition to popular books, it spawned a hugely popular PC game. That’s how Cavill first got hooked on The Witcher, in fact. “I’m a big PC gamer, since I was a young boy, and when I met Lauren (Schmidt Hissrich, co-creator and writer of The Witcher), who told me there were a series of books, I assumed they were based on the games — little did I know they were actually written way before, and so I got to read those and fell in love with them.” Cavill has loved the fantasy genre since he was a wee lad. “For me, it was just such a wonder to read something so new and a fresh take on the genre.”
Netflix’s The Witcher had to satisfy not only fans of the books, but avid gamers as well. Luckily, Cavill pulls it off with remarkable ease. Whether he’s destroying a swamp creature in Episode 1 or putting up with a singing bard companion in Episode 2, he’s central to the show’s sense of humor and convincing supernatural spell.
In The Witcher, it’s his dry one-liners (penned mostly by Hissrich) that help you get comfortably situated in this world of strigas and kikimoras. Every episode, it seems, Geralt stumbles into another town that’s beset by monsters or sorceresses. He strides through each local tavern doorway like a Western antihero, places where everyone seems to know he’s a witcher (maybe the hazel contact lenses tip them off) and regard him with fear or suspicion.
At Conrad Manila, preparing for a day of fan events at Mall of Asia, Cavill looked as far removed from the fantasy figure Geralt as you could imagine: dressed in a tweed jacket over a T-shirt, he could be doing a scholarly book tour. In a way, he was: encouraging people to pick up Sapkowski’s novels, which add up to about 3,000 pages of fantasy set on a remote Continent where magic is a path for people to get ahead, and the tensions between the many different species are “like a tinderbox, just waiting for a spark to set it off.”
He talked about becoming Geralt. “When it came to me playing the games, I was thinking ‘How could I make this into a movie or TV show?’ Then after I met with Lauren, it all happened quite naturally, internally speaking.” Then came the wigs: “What I couldn’t do on my own, preparation-wise, was finished off by (makeup and wig artists) Jackie and Avila in a two-hour makeup process every morning. And Jackie made sure that wig was looking perfect! There were three wigs, and each had its own process, and they were having nightmares about it.”
The CGI creatures in The Witcher could induce nightmares, whether it’s giant eels, howling gnomes or demonic strigas. For Cavill, there were different physical demands: “There’s a lot of explosive movements, and working on a lot of uneven ground — you’re not fighting in a gym, you’re fighting on a slope with cobbles — and so you have to make sure that everything is protected and you build up the right muscle groups to protect things like the joints, hips, elbows, shoulders. My trainer had to make sure that my body could keep up with the shooting schedule.” Swinging that sword — a long way from Superman — was also a special challenge: “The thing about fighting on set with a real-weight sword is that you’re not swinging through someone — you’re not trying to actually kill or hit someone — so stopping the sword is the trickiest bit.”
Hissrich, who also wrote Daredevil and Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy and The Defenders, pushed back on the “woman writing action” label: “I never think of myself as a female writer; I’m just a writer trying to tell good stories,” she says. “What’s important to me is to make sure the stories that we’re telling about women are as dimensional and interesting as the ones we’re telling about men.”
The glue holding all of it together is Geralt: part mutant, part bounty hunter, part detective, he spends each episode chasing down yet another pesky supernatural being, in service of an overall arc that brings together three strong women characters. Not a bad place for a guy to be. What keeps The Witcher from being just a cheesy fantasy tale is the richness of Sapkowski’s world, its complicated back story, and Cavill’s strong, often droll, take on the reluctant hero: he’s a guy, after all, who knows that the real monsters are what we make of ourselves, not how we look or where we’re born.
At the end of the day, The Witcher, for all its curses, bloodletting and gratuitous nudity, taps into the human condition the way any good fantasy or sci-fi should: it’s laid out with jealousies and petty vendettas, but also a sense of justice and fairness. And basically, it’s just violent, elemental, good-crazy fun.
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Catch Season 1 of The Witcher on Netflix now.
