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 ahead, not least of which is the upcoming premiere of The Witcher Season 4 on October 30. So while Hissrich is closing one chapter 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?
The Shocking Transition: Liam Hemsworth Steps Into Geralt’s Boots
To take a step back, in late 2022, Netflix dropped a bombshell. 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 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.”
Why Hemsworth Was the First Choice
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.”
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.”
A Wounded Geralt in Uncharted Territory
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 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.”
Finding the New Geralt’s Voice
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.”
Moving Beyond Cavill’s Performance
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.'”
This Geralt Smiles and Has “Dry Wit”
One big difference between Cavill and Hemsworth that becomes more and more apparent over the course of Season 4… 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.”
The Witcher’s Big Creative “Refresh”
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.
“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.”
New Allies and Pure Evil
Along with a refresh comes new characters, such as Regis, played by Laurence 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.”
Hemsworth, meanwhile, seemed to be 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.”
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.
“The best thing to do with Sharlto is wind him up and let him go,” Hissrich said. “His performance is so authentic. He is so in that character when he shows up on set with his bald cap and his teeth… There are no shades of gray with Leo Bonhart. He’s pure evil.”
A Cursing Parrot?!
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.
“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.”
The Witcher Seasons 4 and 5 Have Less Sex and Nudity
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.
“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, 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.”
The End of The Witcher
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.
“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. 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.”
“There’s a really good payoff to the series,” Hemsworth teased. “And it feels complete.”
A Bittersweet Farewell
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 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… 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.”
As for Hemsworth, when we talked two days after 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 brain and my body just shut down,” Hemsworth said, “and I basically laid in bed for about 24 hours.”
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… 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.”
