The Witcher: Blood Origin, Netflix’s spinoff prequel show based on the hit fantasy series starring Henry Cavill, has cast Sophia Brown in the role of Éile. She was described in a tweet shared on the franchise’s official account as “an elite warrior with the voice of a goddess" whose "career as a nomadic musician gets cut short due to a grand reckoning on the Continent." Brown's other credits include Girl/Haji, Disobedience, The Capture, Clique, and Marcella.
Brown joins the previously-cast Laurence O’Fuarain and Michelle Yeoh in the spinoff, which is expected to kick off production in August in the UK, per Deadline. Jodie Turner-Smith had originally been cast as Éile, but had to drop out due to scheduling issues.
The new series is set 1200 years before the events of the main show and will tell “a story lost to time” as it tracks the origin of the very first Witcher. It will lead to an event described as the “conjunction of the spheres” when the worlds of monsters, men, and elves merged to become one.
Declan De Barra serves as the showrunner for The Witcher: Blood Origin, which is set to have six episodes. Another spinoff, titled The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf — this one’s an anime film — will tell the tale of Vesemir, the Witcher responsible for training Geralt of Rivia, Cavill’s character in the flagship series. Each of these shows is based on the novels by Andrzej Sapkowski, who also serves as a creative consultant on Blood Origin. The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich will serve as an executive producer.
“I am so thrilled to collaborate with Declan and the Netflix team on The Witcher: Blood Origin,” noted Hissrich in a statement announcing the show. “It’s an exciting challenge to explore and expand The Witcher universe created by Andrzej Sapkowski, and we can’t wait to introduce fans to new characters and an original story that will enrich our magical, mythical world even more.”
De Barra said in a statement describing the timeline:
“As a lifelong fan of fantasy, I am beyond excited to tell the story The Witcher: Blood Origin. A question has been burning in my mind ever since I first read The Witcher books - What was the Elven world really like before the cataclysmic arrival of the humans? I've always been fascinated by the rise and fall of civilizations, how science, discovery, and culture flourish right before that fall. How vast swathes of knowledge are lost forever in such a short time, often compounded by colonization and a rewriting of history. Leaving only fragments of a civilization’s true story behind. The Witcher: Blood Origin will tell the tale of the Elven civilization before its fall, and most importantly reveal the forgotten history of the very first Witcher.”
The Witcher is a high-priority title for Netflix. The streaming service, in recent years, has doubled down on nabbing IP that it can mine for decades. The Cavill-fronted original broke viewership records for the platform, albeit based on its own debatable data metrics. The second season recently wrapped filming, and is expected to premiere later this year on Netflix.