Princess Cirilla might think she’s an ordinary royal. But there are secrets that, when revealed, change her whole life. Actress Freya Allan, showrunner Lauren Hissrich and the team behind The Witcher tell just how Ciri survives.
Princess Cirilla might think she’s an ordinary royal. But there are secrets that, when revealed, change her whole life. Actress Freya Allan, showrunner Lauren Hissrich and the team behind The Witcher tell just how Ciri survives.
Freya: Whilst filming, it felt like our lives were almost paralleling each other.
This is Freya Allan, who you know as Cirilla, The Lion Cub of Cintra. In the first season of The Witcher, Ciri goes through a ton of life changes. Which Freya could relate to, because she was cast in the series right as she graduated from high school.
Freya: I’d just been at school and suddenly I was going into this very adult world, and you know, having a huge responsibility. And I feel like whilst filming I could use that, my real life and transfer it into the role because it was almost like we were going through the same thing.
Except you know… Unlike Ciri, Freya lives here on Earth.
Freya: She’s in a very different world to what I'm in, and she’s having to tackle with things that don’t exist
Monsters of course, and magic … but also plenty of very real things that do exist. Like the trauma of losing family members. Ciri experiences that during the Slaughter of Cintra.
Freya: The trauma she goes through, I can’t say I’ve experienced. I think that was something I really had to think about because I’ve never gone through something like that myself.
Welcome to the third and final episode of Behind The Scenes of The Witcher. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins.
Today, we’re following Princess Ciri, and taking a look at how her character was shaped in the writers room, how Freya brought her to life, what Ciri means to The Continent. And of course… how it all ties to destiny.
This is Behind the Scenes of The Witcher, episode three: Cirilla, The Lion Cub of Cintra.
Sophie: With Ciri, we had to cast 16 year old who had lost her parents and was living with her grandmother and then lost her grandmother, in brutal circumstances,
This right here is The Witcher’s casting director, Sophie Holland.
Sophie: Imagine trying to find a 16 year old girl that can portray that with real feeling and really take you on that journey with her.
One of the first big shifts that the writers made when adapting Ciri from Andrzej Sapkowski’s books was to make her older… but just by a few years. But that presented a challenge for Sophie. She had to find a teenager who could capture both that innocence and depth. Which she saw in Freya Allen.
Sophie: I just remember she was wearing these like, these blue kind of bell bottom jeans, you know what I’m talking about? And this like t-shirt and she looked so small and so vulnerable. And we asked her to do this scene where she was saying goodbye to her grandma who’s just about to die. And it was SO moving and so small and natural that, that it just broke our hearts. And I was like, Yeah, that’s the girl I wanna follow
For Lauren Hissrich, The Witcher’s writer, showrunner, and executive producer, Ciri was so much more than just a young princess.
Lauren: Ciri functions as the eyes, the lense I guess, through which we see The Continent..because she walks through at the beginning from a naive and innocent place. But through her, we actually get to see just how brutal the continent is.
What Lauren’s getting at—is just how important Ciri is for the show’s world building. Which is a sizeable task.
Lauren: You can’t introduce an audience to a super complex world with, you know, with 15 different kingdoms and each of them have their own agendas. You can’t do that all in episode one, you would lose people really fast.
So instead of a survey of the entire continent ... the writers decided to start a bit smaller, with Geralt in Blaviken and Ciri in Cintra.
We learn all about Cintra through Ciri, because the kingdom’s history – their battles, victories and defeats… they’re her family’s history too.
Eist: She needs to understand the way of things
Calanthe: We will not fall because we are not under attack. She’s a child.
Ciri: You won your first Battle in Hochebuz when you were my age, I’ve heard the ballad
Eist: Pretty ballads hide bastard truths
In this scene, Ciri is talking with her step-grandfather, King Eist, and her grandmother Queen Calanthe—A warrior queen who reigns over the important political region.
Lauren: Cintra is the jewel of the Continent. And so when we were designing it, it was based on a palace called Carcassonne in France. Which is basically a walled palace within city walls, highly fortified, modern for its time.
And in the heart of the palace, where King Eist and Queen Calanthe sit on their throne, is the Great Hall of Cintra.
Lauren: I guess it was one of those moments where you type in “Interior: Cintra Great Hall.” and you know, you say it’s the most beautiful ballroom in the world and you then keep typing. And someone created the most beautiful ballroom in the world.
That someone is none other than production designer Andrew Laws.
Andrew: When we started with the Great Hall of Cintra, and just Cintra in general, the idea was to create an Elysium.
Basically a paradise.
Andrew: And that was really about looking at Cintra through the innocence of Ciri’s upbringing, and her perception. Um, not a childlike perception, but just simply her perception of her childhood and what Cintra has been to her. Because that’s really how we introduce it. We start very much on the ground with Ciri.
Remember? She was literally on the ground, playing knucklebones, or what you might know as jacks.
And then we see her cracking jokes about the game with King Eist while Queen Calanthe is leading a knighting ceremony.
Eist: At least you didn’t shit your cacks.
Calanthe: As members of the royal family, is it too much to ask that you exercise a modicum of respect?
And through Ciri’s young, innocent eyes, the hall looks regal and grand.
Andrew: The Cintra great hall was essentially designed as a throne room would be designed, with a sense of awe and grandeur so that anyone arriving from another kingdom, um, would feel small in the environment compared to the royalty they were approaching.
Lauren: There are times where I would walk onto sets or walk onto locations that were chosen or see costumes that I would actually get tears in my eyes. And the Great Hall of Cintra was one of those. It was so big, bigger than I could have imagined, we joked about having Witcher-themed wedding in it, so beautiful, no detail left behind.
Andrew: The doors were 20 feet high. It was actually quite a feat of engineering to get those doors hung, and the idea being that anybody who walks through those doors is gonna, is gonna feel small.
While buildings help to establish this massive environment, what really makes a kingdom is the people. Take a look at Ciri and the city's inhabitants. Their hair, their clothes... all of it is quintessentially Cintran.
Csilla: In this world of the castle people, for example, who are upper class, but not royalty.
Csilla Blake Horvath – head of The Witcher’s hair and makeup department
They have beautiful hair, they do wear accessories, but not as, I wouldn’t say flashy. But more gold and stones which gives you the idea of how rich they are. And then the village people are village people. The costumes, the hair is more simple, and they don’t wear really hair accessories apart from like a piece of fabric they put in their braids and stuff. Obviously, royalty is royalty so you can go as far as you want.
Despite Ciri’s status as royalty, Csilla wanted to avoid drowning her in jewelry and ornate decorations. Cintra’s aesthetic is much more medieval and gothic.
Csilla: I did some research for a younger person in that period, like this medieval period, how a princess would wear her hair in certain situations….
Like Ciri’s updo hairstyle in the first episode. It’s beautiful, intricate, but not over the top. Csilla says Ciri’s look was pretty simple.
Csilla: The most significant thing we had to do was the hair color. She was blonde anyways, but we had to, it was a more golden hair color rather than the ashen hair, so we colored her hair four times I think before we got to the final color.
Freya: Yeah it was a weird look as well coz I had like bleached eyebrows.
This is actor Freya Allen again
Freya: And it was bizarre, I spent basically seven months looking a bit like alien-elven creature going out in the streets. I think people were like, yeah that’s an interesting look.
One of the more complicated elements of Ciri’s look is her bewitching green eyes—almost as iconic as Geralt’s yellow ones. In real life, Freya’s got a set of striking blue eyes. So Csilla took a great deal of care finding her just the right color contacts to wear...
Csilla: We had to do like, I don’t know, three, four versions of green. We saw her mom in a flashback sequence.
Csilla: Her eye color was much brighter green.
And Ciri’s father Duny, he’s got brown eyes. So Csilla wanted Ciri’s eye color to be some compromise of that combination.
Csilla: Ciri’s eye color, we wanted to be like a softer green, like if you look at her, it’s something you stay on, and it’s there for a while, like oh, that’s an interesting eye color, but not as obvious as the mom’s eye color was.
The truth about Ciri’s birth parents isn’t revealed until the fourth episode … but these greenish brown eyes … they’re a subtle clue that there’s more to Ciri than we initially know.
And she doesn’t stay an innocent pretty little princess for very long…
In many ways, Ciri anchors the season. In The Witcher’s non-linear storytelling, her timeline serves as the present. Her perspective helps us learn about The Continent, the whole world of The Witcher. And for Freya, Ciri’s understanding is constantly changing.
Freya: I think she definitely recognizes that she is clearly more privileged than a lot of people who live in Cintra. And she’s bright, she’s intelligent, she can see that. And, But I think for her, she thinks that when she goes out and plays with the boys and she’s playing knucklebones she thinks “yeah, this is the real world and then I go back to being a princess.” And so, those are the two worlds to her. But actually, she doesn’t realize that there’s a far more brutal and horrific world beyond the walls of Cintra.
In the very first episode, we see the Slaughter of Cintra. The soldiers of Nilfgaard come charging in, in a storm of murder and destruction. Eventually taking over the castle– and murdering Ciri’s grandmother and step-grandfather in the process.
Ciri sees her family for the last time, and then has to flee the only home she has ever known. A home where she was loved and protected.
As all of this is happening, she’s sent on a quest.
Calanthe (clip): Find Geralt of Rivia, he is your destiny
Lauren: I do think there’s an element of her being innocent and wide eyed at the beginning. But I do believe that’s stripped from her really quickly.
Lauren says sure … Ciri’s story leans on a lot of familiar fantasy tropes. She’s a wide eyed innocent person being sent on a quest. But Lauren and the writers wanted to subvert those tropes as well, the way Andrzej Sapkowski did in his stories.
Take Ciri’s banshee-like screaming… a young person with a great untapped power? That’s classic fantasy right there. That’s like Luke Skywalker. But here in The Witcher, it feels much, much darker. Which stuck out to Freya.
Freya: In episode seven, she goes out of control and she wakes up and she has very brutally killed the horse and her old friends. And I think, I mean, imagine killing people without meaning to.
Brandon: How does Ciri feel about these inherited powers because 1) it doesn’t seem like she doesn’t seem to know where they come from, or that she even had them. 2) they are paired with these sort of, umm, traumatic experiences, so like, Is Ciri confused about these things, is it frightening?
Freya: I think it’s far more a traumatic thing than “oh it’s cool, look at me I have powers”. I don’t think that’s going through her head. I think it’s partly paired with the fact that she’s overwhelmed because there’s so much she doesn’t know about. Her grandmother has just said “oh, you know, find Geralt of Rivia.” Who the hell is Geralt of Rivia? She’s never heard about him. So in that moment, she’s like “Has anyone told me about this? Has my whole life been a lie?”
It’s the kind of moment that makes you want to scream.
Calanthe: You are destined for great things.
Ciri: I can’t do this without you.
Lazlo: We must go your highness.
Ciri: NOOOOO! *scream*
Freya: What I love about when they come is when she’s in kind of most need of them. You know, that is the time when she really needs something else. She’s lost everybody, she’s lost her, you know, her grandmother, she’s lost Mousesack who’s like her babysitter, she’s lost her knight who’s like her older brother. She’s lost every guardian, everyone who was looking out for her, everyone who is closest to her. They are gone. And so now she has to find this kind of strength within her and it comes out as this huge power that she didn’t know she has. So it’s almost like that’s there to sort of protect her when no one else is there anymore.
And with her new found ability, Ciri is officially a girl on the run, another classic fantasy move.
Lauren: So we did tap into that trope, which is the young woman with a lot of power, but who doesn’t quite know her place yet. I actually think we complicated that trope a lot because what we’re doing there is breaking down her preconceptions of what this world is and we’re having her learn a lot. And you know, if you ask Freya Allan, who portrays Ciri, she will tell you she spent a lot of this season running through woods, from other things. She’s, she’s officially girl on the run, but towards the end she’s running towards something else, which is also a good shift for her.
With Ciri now living as a fugitive, Freya Allan’s no longer wearing beautiful dresses meant for a princess. No, she’s got to wear something much more discreet and lowkey. As Nilfgaard is taking over Cintra, Queen Calanthee, made sure Ciri had just the thing...
Calanthe: Lazlo, bring her cloak
That blue cloak with the draping hood
Freya: I remember the first time I saw it I was like, “wow, this is beautiful”. And it is beautiful, I mean when you see it after the 5th month of wearing it, 6th month, 7th month, you’re just like “I just can’t wait to get rid of that.” It got, I guess more and more tatty and muddy as filming went along.
Besides that huge hood she can pull over her head, Ciri also tries to conceal her identity by putting a bunch of mud in her traditionally pristine, ashen blonde hair.
Freya: My hair, because it’d been bleached, but they had to kind of keep redying it because they would put so much mud in it that would change the color of it. That’s how much mud they were putting in.
Csilla: It was makeup.
Hair and make up artist Csilla Blake-Horvath again.
Csilla: It’s a powder which we mixed with water. But it has pigments in it, so if she puts it on, her hair can catch the brown or red or whatever pigment it had in this mud. So we had to try on real hair pieces how the mud would affect her hair color.
Freya: Like, I would come in in the morning and all it was like was like, “let’s put purple under you eyes and make it look like you haven’t slept in weeks, let’s just make you look awful. Cover your hair in mud.”
At this point on her exhausting quest, Ciri knows she’s gotta find Geralt of Rivia and that she’s being hunted by some Nilfgaard guy in a feathered black helmet.
But she doesn’t know who either of them are.
Or why any of this is happening.
OR where her powers are coming from.
OR why she even has them!
And then … in episode 4 … we find out.
Lauren: I love origin stories and specifically for Ciri. they were very important to me.
Lauren and the writers developed Ciri’s origin story from Andrzej Sapkowski’s short story, “A Question of Price.”
This story takes place before Ciri was born. In the show, we travel back in time to see Ciri’s grandmother, Queen Calanthe throwing a big party to determine who will be a worthy suitor to marry her daughter, Pavetta—Ciri’s eventual mother.
Lauren: There are key moments in our lives that make us who we are and those are the key moments that I wanna see for our characters.
For Ciri—that key moment—comes down to four words: The Law of Surprise.
Lauren: Don’t make me explain the law of surprise!
Sorry, Lauren, we gotta do it. In the world of The Witcher, the Law of Surprise is an ancient vow that is taken very, very seriously.
Lauren: If you...If you save someone’s life, that person is then indebted to you. If they do not have the money to pay you at the time, they can offer you something called the Law of Surprise instead. Basically, the Law of Surprise means that you will get that first thing that they find at their homes that they didn’t know existed. So it’s got a lot of parameters in it. So let’s say two people meet, one of them saves the other’s life. The one whose life was saved goes home and finds a new calf has been born to their cow, or suddenly there’s a new crop of grain they weren’t expecting. Then all of that grain is going be packaged up and given to that other person, or that calf will be given to the person who saved their lives.
It’s one huge gamble. You could end up with a puppy, or a great big bag of gold. Or you could end with something a little more, uh ...unexpected.
Lauren: What we see happen most often and when the law of surprise really becomes interesting is when a character comes home and find they have a child they didn't know they had, in this case that their wife is pregnant and gives birth shortly after they get home.
Ciri’s destiny is determined by three claims of the Law of Surprise.
The first comes from her father, Duny. He’s that cursed knight with the face of a porcupine. Duny says that when he saved the life of Pavetta’s father, he was thanked with the gift of the “Law of Surprise.” So now, all these years later, Duny’s like, “listen… I have the right to marry Queen Calanthe’s daughter Pavetta.”
Duny (clip): Lioness of Cintra! I come to claim what is rightfully mine. Pavetta - by the Law of Surprise.
The second claim comes from Geralt after a full on brawl. A brawl which starts because Queen Calanthe is feeling the reality of her daughter marrying a human porcupine.
Lauren: Calanthe orders her guards to kill him, and orders Geralt to help kill him. And Geralt can see that Duny is cursed, he’s not a monster and thus he refuses to kill him, and Geralt jumps into the fray and ends up protecting Duny.
Classic Geralt. And then, after Pavetta declares her love for Duny, Queen Calanthe herself tries to assassinate him.
Lauren: What this causes is Pavetta to scream.
Clip of Pavetta screaming
Lauren: At first she just sounds like a woman who is watching the love of her life about to die. But her scream actually propels an energetic force through the cintra great hall and begins a cyclone. It’s a really incredible sequence. I was there for the filming of that and it was it was quite something.
Clip of swirling cyclone
Alex: Oh my god, that was amazing, that was tricky. So that whole sequence was sort of much more sort of actiony and fun and very fantastical.
Alex Garcia Lopez directed episodes three and four. As he mentioned in our last episode, he likes to shoot wet, with lots of sweat and real elements. He didn’t want visual effects to just come in and CGI the entire thing. He wanted to create a real cyclone on his set. So in order to do that, they got some fans.
Alex: These huge fans. There were about 5 or 6 industrial fans, petrol fans and again what I wanted to do was bring an element of physicality to it.
Lauren: It was crazy, we shot with real and practical dust.
“Practical dust.” It’s a kind of prop dust that was blowing around the room that the actors could react to in real time.
Alex: We had about maybe 8, 9 people from the art department all throwing debris, obviously plastic for health and safety issues. But you know, throwing chairs, helmets, knives, chicken wings, beer bottles, you name it. They were just basically throwing all sorts of crap between the camera and the actors.
And it’s not just the episode’s main actors. Remember this is all going down in a huge party that escalated into a big fight, which means this scene has lots of background actors that were on set too.
Csilla: I think it was like 200 background and 50 or 60 stunts.
This is Csilla again. She had at least 25 makeup and hair people on set, all for this one scene. They have to get all the ladies updos right for the party, which takes a long time.
And then they’ve also got to work on all these stunt guys who need to be fighting.
Csilla: From 60 stunts, 40 of them had modern haircuts because they’re not doing only Witcher. They’re going to another show and then another show. So probably 50 of them was wearing wigs.
Which THEN have to look like they’ve been through a cyclone halfway through the scene.
Csilla: That was probably the hardest part, time-wise, work-wise.
For Alex, all of this was worth it. It’s a key moment in the series that he wanted to make sure felt real … and gritty.
Alex: But I really wanted the actors to feel the cyclone, and they had a great time, they had, you know, a lot of fun with it.
Eventually, after the cyclone dissipates, cooler heads prevail, and Calanthe grants permission for Pavetta to wed Duny. Destiny has struck once again.
Duny absolutely insists on repaying Geralt for protecting him during the melee.
Lauren: Geralt, kind of in a flippant way says…
Geralt (clip): I claim the tradition as you have, the Law of Surprise. Give me that which you already have but do not know
Lauren: Because I don’t believe in destiny anyway, I’m not coming back for anything. And in this moment, Pavetta begins vomiting and we realize Pavetta is pregnant.
Geralt (clip): Fuck.
Lauren: And this is how Ciri, Ciri becomes tied to Geralt.
Freya: So for Ciri, she is technically destined for Geralt, but there are a lot of choices she makes that allow that to come to fruition.
Now to be clear. Geralt is Ciri’s destiny, not her fate. It’s only because she decides to fight for her own survival, tap into her deepest self and channel her powers… that she reaches Geralt.
It was this … Ciri’s determination, her choices, that Freya really connected with while portraying this character.
Freya: We hold a lot of value for our voice, and we both feel like it’s important to utilize that and I feel like she very much sees it as, it’s a power she has. She feels power in her voice and choice and I’m very much the same. I think that is something that belongs to me, that I can decide and I can choose where my life is going to go. And she, throughout this season has a lot of people constantly telling her what she should and shouldn't do, what she’s going to become, what her limitations are. But ultimately she becomes the dictator of her own future because she values that.
Lauren: What I love about her character, probably more than anything, is her strength, and I don’t mean about picking up swords, and hurting people. What I mean is her ability to pick herself up and keep walking and persevering. And knowing that she has to survive, that if she wants to live she has to keep going.
Ciri and Geralt are brought together by a third instance of the Law of Surprise.
In the season finale, Ciri realizes she used her powers and killed her friends who were attacking her. She’s eventually taken in by a woman, the wife of a merchant.
Meanwhile, Geralt saves a merchant from a bunch of ghouls.
This is of course the same merchant. He offers Geralt the law of surprise, without knowing that his wife just took in a girl.
And finally Ciri and Geralt meet in the woods.
Geralt: People linked by destiny always find each other
It was the only scene that Freya and Henry Cavill, who played Geralt, had together.
Freya: It was really nice getting to actually work with Henry. Because everyone had been asking me “oh so what’s it like working with Henry” and I was like, I haven’t, I haven’t worked with him at all.
The scene is just two minutes long
The cast and crew knew they needed it to be perfect.
Freya: We shot it over 3 days because for some reason they kept scheduling it at the wrong time. They kept scheduling it, like, in the evening. And it would get dark and they’d be like “oh it’s too dark.” It happened once. And then, the next day happened again. I was like “have they not learned that at this time it gets dark. So at the time I was kind of like, “this is a little bit irritating cos we’ve kind of shot this twice and still haven’t got it or whatever.”
The silver lining to all this, is that it allowed Henry and Freya to rehearse the scene. In television and film, taking the time to block out a scene and run through it really isn’t the norm anymore. So being able to sneak in some rehearsal time was a nice bonus.
BUT, that also meant that Freya was running a lot. Like several takes. Every day. For three days!
Freya: So you know like, Henry’s like amazing at the gym, and I am not, I don’t exercise very much, Actually I probably did most of my exercise on the show because I did so much running. But yeah, so I had to do this sort of running towards him, and because we, we obviously did quite a lot of takes, I was kind of like, “wooh”. I’d get to him and be like “my god” and I’d be like “oh god this is kind of embarrassing because he’s so like, he gets to the gym”. And there’s me who’s run a few meters and I’m out of breath. I was like, I’m gonna need to up my game for season 2
With season 2 officially announced and in the works, there’s certainly going to be more running for Ciri.
Ciri and Geralt’s timelines have converged into one, so it’s just a matter of time before Yennefer of Vengerberg joins them.
Who is Yennefer?
And now we’ve run as far as we’re going to go … We have reached the conclusion of Behind The Scenes of The Witcher.
We want to thank you for kicking it with us this season. And we really hope you’ve enjoyed our trip through the portal and into the fantasy world of The Continent– learning more about Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri, and spending time with the amazing creators and crew that adapted and brought The Witcher to your screens.
Behind The Scenes of The Witcher was produced by Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios. Our executive producers are Max Linsky, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Rae Votta. Our senior producer is Bari Finkel and our associate producer is Melissa Slaughter.
Editing by Jonathan [men-HEE-var].
Hannis Brown is our engineer extraordinaire.
Production help from Elena Schwartz.
Special thanks to Luke Sarafin, Tera Vale Ragan, Max Mills and Nicolas Zuber.
And I’m your host Brandon Jenkins.
Make sure you rate and review, and subscribe for the next season, where we’ll be diving into another fantastic Netflix series.