Over the weekend, Netflix announced that The Witcher would be returning for a fourth season, which is exciting news considering Season 3 of the show hasn’t even aired yet and the streamer has a history of abruptly canceling its series. However, the excitement of the announcement was dampened by the news that Henry Cavill would be passing his sword and medallion to Liam Hemsworth, who will be stepping into the role of Geralt of Rivia. Someone needs to check and see if Maxwell Lord is playing with the Dreamstone again because clearly, this is the Monkey Paw effect consequences of using it to wish Cavill back into the role of Superman. Hemsworth may seem like an unexpected pick for Geralt, but so was Cavill when his casting was announced back in 2018. And if 2022 has taught us anything, there is a lot of power packed into a white-blonde lace front wig.
Hemsworth has a few things stacked against him: he is the younger (and much hotter) brother of Chris Hemsworth; he is widely known for his tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship with Miley Cyrus; and his fans get pinned as only liking him for his work as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games. The latter, of course, completely disregards that some of his best work is actually in The Dressmaker, Most Dangerous Game, and yes, The Last Song. While Cavill may have had Superman on his resume when he saddled up Roach, the two actors have had a fairly similar trajectory as hot himbos and shoot-'em-up baddies. At the end of the day, that’s kind of the exact right fit for someone like Geralt. You want someone buff enough to rip the heads off monsters and hot enough to make Yennefer swoon and roll her eyes at whatever comes out of his mouth.
'The Witcher' Is No Stranger to Complaints
By design, Geralt is a difficult character to embody in live-action. When you have a fanbase who has spent hundreds of hours playing as Geralt, there’s going to be a certain degree of ownership, whereas other franchises might not encounter that same sort of fan reaction to deviations in the story. No matter who they cast as Geralt in 2018 or who they announced would replace that actor, fans were never going to be happy.
The Witcher has been plagued with critiques since it first premiered on Netflix, with most fans relentlessly comparing it to the video games, which are arguably pretty fantastic pieces of storytelling. The video games are based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s best-selling book series, and the Netflix series is a loose adaptation of both pieces of source material. Cavill’s Geralt has been no stranger to complaints either, with the actor even having to explain the accent he chose to use for the monster hunter because fans took issue with it. Season 2 brought The Witcher even more criticism when the show killed off a fan-favorite character who definitely doesn’t die like that in the books; the argument, of course, was that the show was taking a different route and that required higher stakes and new motivators to propel Geralt forward.
There is no world in which Hemsworth’s introduction as Geralt won’t be met with criticism when even Cavill wasn’t immune to gripes from fans who claimed his casting was “wrong” and critics who snarked that he might as well have been wearing a helmet like The Mandalorian because he lacked charm. Despite reviews saying otherwise, Cavill is definitely not lacking in the charm department, and neither is Hemsworth.
Certain Fan Reactions Seem Pointed
Cavill took on the role of Geralt during a period when his future as Superman was largely unknown and the future of the DCEU as a whole seemed pretty uncertain. He had just wrapped on Justice League and there had been no news about a sequel to Man of Steel, which was five years behind him at the time. The actor was still doing promos for The Witcher in September of this year, during Netflix’s annual TUDUM event, but it was reportedly around this same time that Dwayne Johnson won his multi-year fight to get Cavill back into his super-suit and a super-secret post-credit scene was filmed for Black Adam.
When news broke about his long-awaited return and Cavill started sharing his excitement about returning to the newly minted DC Universe under its newly appointed co-heads—the countdown began on which of his other commitments he would be shedding. Projects like the inevitable Enola Holmes 3, the newly announced Guy Ritchie spy film, and the still far-off Highlander remake are all easy enough to schedule around whatever commitments he will have as Superman, but filming a television series like The Witcher is a lot harder to work around. So why is the internet trying to convince itself that Cavill’s departure was the result of some secret war being waged against The Witcher’s showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich? Well, the internet is rarely kind to female showrunners, much less those taking on the task of adapting video games or high fantasy.
In the minutes following Cavill and Hemsworth’s Instagram announcements, tweets started circulating on Elon Musk’s Twitter misrepresenting segments from year-old interviews and articles to make it seem like Cavill and Hissrich have been in some sort of battle of wills against each other. One article makes it seem like the two clashed over Cavill wanting Geralt to have more dialogue in Season 2 when, in reality, the full interview in THR makes it clear that Hissirch took Cavill’s notes to heart and found a way for them to coalesce with her plans to focus on Geralt’s father-like relationship with Ciri (Freya Allan). Another tweet contained screenshots of quotes from an interview Cavill did with The Philippine Star ahead of Season 2, where he spoke about being a massive fan of the franchise as a whole and how he had to approach the series as a fan and also an actor being paid to play a role. After all, this is the same man who spent the lockdown playing the games on the hardest setting. No part of the quotes within the context of the conversation was negative or overly harsh towards the series, but they were easy quotes to misrepresent with screenshots, because he was talking about his desire to see more of the books brought into the series to help flesh Geralt out more.
A lot of this speculation started after Beau DeMayo, a former writer and producer on the series, claimed on Instagram that individuals in the writer’s room on the show weren’t fans of the source material. His comments came in tandem with remarks about the upcoming X-Men '97 reboot that he’s executive producing and writing, which he intends to only staff with writers who are actually fans of the original story. There’s no question that writers should be well-versed in the stories they are adapting, but there is always room for improvement on the source material and new stories shouldn’t seek to repeat the exact same storylines over and over again. Most recently, Disney+’s Moon Knight was met with significant pushback from fans who were disappointed that the Oscar Isaac-led series had changed so much of Marc Spector’s backstory. (DeMayo wrote for that series as well.)
In all honesty, it seems like fans of The Witcher are looking for a larger conspiracy to explain Cavill’s departure from the series when the truth is plain enough to see. It’s more fun to pin the blame on Hissrich and some psychological war between Cavill and the writers, when the reality is that Superman was always going to be his first priority in his career. Geralt may have been a nice adventure for his geeky soul, but Superman is the role of a lifetime, and with folks like James Gunn now at the helm of DC Studios there’s so much room for that character to soar higher than he’s ever soared before.
What Does This Mean for Hemsworth's Casting in Season 4?
The Witcher has become a bit of a flagship fantasy franchise for Netflix, with The Witcher: Blood Origin arriving on Christmas this year, and plans for another anime film like Nightmare of the Wolf arriving sometime in the future. Hissrich revealed back in 2019 that she had a seven-season plan for the series, which now likely hinges on the reception that Hemsworth is met with in Season 4. But it also explains why the streamer opted to recast the role, rather than cancel the show (like they have so many others in the past). The Witcher wrapped in September, after Cavill returned to the set following COVID-related production issues, which lines up with when the actor and his team would have been looped in on the Black Adam end-credit scene — meaning The Witcher may have had time to work something into the finale which would explain the Hemsworth-ing of Geralt when Season 4 begins.
Replacing actors can be a jarring scenario for any series, but the fantasy genre has a certain degree of flexibility that other projects do not. Geralt faces off against a number of different monsters, witches and sorceresses, and other magical creatures that could easily lead to some sort of face-changing situation. The Witcher has already bent the rules with how their cast of characters has aged, namely with Jaskier (Joey Batey) not really aging at all after a pretty significant time jump, so arguments about Cavill and Hemsworth’s six-year age difference are moot. If they want to or need to make Hemsworth look like he’s in his late thirties instead of early thirties, I’m sure The Witcher’s award-winning make-up artists will be able to handle that.
It’s easy to look at Hemsworth and see an Australian pretty-boy who lives in the shadow of his Thor-playing brother, but he has the acting chops to take on Geralt and deliver as praise-worthy of a performance as his predecessor. Cavill seems at peace with Hemsworth replacing him, and since fans seem to think Cavill is the gatekeeper of all things Geralt, we should take his confidence in Hemsworth at face value.