Declan De Barra, showrunner for the upcoming Netflix prequel The Witcher: Blood Origin, has revealed a few details about how the new show came about and its world in a sitdown with EW. The Witcher: Blood Origin is a live-action prequel miniseries that tackles a major event in Witcher history: the Conjunction of the Spheres, the phenomenon that brought humans, elves, and monsters together in the same world.
De Barra, who served as a writer and producer on the flagship Witcher show, was sought out by showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Netflix exec Kelly Leugenbiehl over whether he had any ideas for a possible prequel series. According to Leugenbiehl, De Barra actually did have a pitch of his own, based around only "a few lines in the books."
"We were trying to understand what the world was like for elves right before the Conjunction of the Spheres," De Barra told EW. "It's very vague in the books as to what happened. I got out a whiteboard and sketched out this plan of what I thought: what elves wanted in this world and what the society was like pre-colonization. That kind of stuck." According to De Barra, he dreamed the idea for the series and the very next day, wrote it out on the back of a napkin.
"This whole time in [Andrzej Sapkowski's] books, he reinterprets folktales and history," De Barra said. "And when you look at our own history, societies that had been at their height, like the Roman Empire or the Mayan Empire, would be right before the fall and then we're in dark ages again. That fascinated me to wonder what that [elven] world could have been and what society would have been like. That's what we're going to explore here."
De Barra added that as for the potential run of the series, Blood Origin has a solid ending, but whether a second season could be in the books is "up to the fans."
The Witcher: Blood Origin stars Sophia Brown as Éile, Laurence O'Fuarain as Fjall, Michelle Yeoh as Scían, Nathaniel Curtis as Brían, and Lenny Henry as Balor. A release date for Netflix has yet to be announced.