Geralt of Rivia is our favorite monster hunting mutant on The Continent. Find out how the writers, producers, and crew adapted the iconic character– from his yellow eyes to his monster fights.
Geralt of Rivia is our favorite monster hunting mutant on The Continent. Find out how the writers, producers, and crew adapted the iconic character– from his yellow eyes to his monster fights.
Tomek: One of the really interesting things about Witcher is that it's actually quite universal. Almost everyone can find something in this book. Something in this TV show and relate to one of the characters. And it's beautiful.
Clip montage:
Yennefer: You’re a mutant.
Geralt: A witcher…
Ciri: My grandmother said I had to leave. Why does the world depend on it?
Yennefer: Nobody smart plays fair
Ciri: screams
Welcome to the world of the new Netflix series, The Witcher. A world inhabited with everything you've come to expect from a good fantasy story – monsters, monarchs... characters who kill those monsters and monarchs.
But only The Witcher has Geralt of Rivia, Yennefer of Vengerberg, and Cirilla the Lion Cub of Cintra. All of whom reside on The Continent—a vast, sprawling land in the midst of turmoil all swirling around in a cauldron of chaos, magic, war, and destiny.
Mousesack (clip): You can’t outrun destiny just because you’re terrified of it.
The show’s origins go back to a popular series of short stories and novels written by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski—and he started writing these way back in the mid 1980's. When I say they were popular, I mean hugely popular—like ‘translated into 20 languages’ and turned into a few video games popular.
Tomek: It reflects a little bit of my experience as a, as a child when I was growing up in a country which was not fully free. Because Poland at that time was still a communist country.
This is Tomek Baginski, an executive producer on The Witcher. He’s who you heard at the very beginning. Tomek was just a teenager in Poland when Andre’s books first came out. When he was in high school, he devoured all these adventures of Geralt of Rivia, the mutant monster hunter.
It wasn’t just because he loved fantasy, there was something real about The Witcher saga and Geralt, that resonated with Tomek.
Tomek: And to see this character who has, like, the soul I understand, and the world which is as complex as the world I see around me. It was really, really interesting because it's kind of unique to have a book like that, which is...which is like so...which is fantasy, right? It's just a fairytale story of monsters and monster hunters. But it tells so many great things about the world we are living in.
Tomek grew up and became a filmmaker. And he knew he wanted to do something cinematic with Andre’s books.
He wanted to breathe life into the characters and images that were cemented into his mind, and he wanted to share his connection with them, so that others could connect too.
So he reached out to the guy behind these fantastic stories, the author Andrzej Sapkowski.
Tomek: I just wrote him a letter, a very, very long letter, like I think it was like 20 pages or actually or 25. I actually, like, printed it out as, like, a little document because I thought that maybe, maybe this is the way how to, how to approach a writer. Right? To write something.
To be clear, Tomek just printed out his letter and mailed it.
In this letter, Tomek waxed poetic about his connection to Andrzej’s material, but also dove deep into the technicalities of how he’d turn Andrzej’s work into something for the screen.
He broke down the process of pitching it to a studio, bringing in producers. All the very tedious, intricate parts of adapting a book. Tomek thought his chances of actually getting the show made were pretty slim. So from his perspective he thought...
Tomek: Where is the risk? All he has to say is to say yes. And let's, let's have some fun. And, and he told me later that he almost threw the letter to the trash because he he gets so many letters, right? So many information. But but but he saw that it's actually quite, you know, 25 pages. It's not...and it's printed. It's not just e-mail.
Brandon: It's thoughtful.
Tomek: So, so he actually read it and he answered one word. Hmmm. It's interesting.
Brandon: That was the response?
Tomek: Yeah. The first, the first response was it's interesting.
Eventually Tomek convinced Andrezj it was a good idea.
The first season of The Witcher is out now on Netflix. But there’s so much that went down between Tomek sending Andrzej Sapkwoski a letter and you sitting at home hitting play on episode one.
So over the next three episodes, we’re gonna fill you in on how it all came to be.
We’re gonna find out how you take a fantasy that has 8 books, with well over 3,000 pages of source material, and turn it into an epic television series. From narrative decisions, to set building, and everything in between.
We’ll dive into Yennefer’s new backstory.
Yennefer: Remember that scared girl who tumbled at your feet in this cave? Totally unaware of her power? I want to go back home to Aedern and never be her again.
We’ll follow Cirilla, the Lion Cub of Cintra.
Ciri: “maybe he’s the other edge of my destiny”
But first, in this episode, we’re staring deep into the yellow eyes of Geralt of Rivia.
My name is Brandon Jenkins. I’m a journalist, a podcast host, and a fan of all things fantasy.
It’s time to toss a coin to your witcher, because this is Behind The Scenes of The Witcher: Episode One: Geralt of Rivia.
Once Tomek got the greenlight from the author, he pitched the show to Netflix. They were interested, and wanted to tap Lauren Hissrich to help make this fantasy world a reality.
Lauren: I like to describe The Witcher as real people wandering within a really not real world.
Lauren is the showrunner, executive producer, and writer of The Witcher. I spoke to her about what it was like to adapt the series for television.
Lauren: I had read The Last Wish, which is the first book of short stories that Andrjez Sapkowski, the author, wrote. I'd read it about a year before I heard about Netflix making the show and I had truly loved it.
But when she was approached to make the series, Lauren said no.
Lauren: I'm a fan of fantasy, but I'd never written fantasy before.
Lauren got her start as an intern and then writer on The West Wing, which is an early 2000s political drama. And that’s pretty far from fantasy. She worked her way up and moved on to shows like Parenthood and Power. She did all of this before writing and producing shows based on comics. We’re talking about Daredevil, The Defenders, and Umbrella Academy.
So by this point, she was used to adaptation... which means she knows the stakes of taking on a big franchise.
Lauren: I wanted to make sure that if I was going to tackle something that was so loved by so many people already, that I could really honor the subject matter and give the fans what they deserve.
Brandon: Why focus on the books and not the video games? I think a lot of - especially when you think of maybe the American audience - there might be a larger base of people that are aware of the video game and maybe still getting hip to the books.
Lauren: Absolutely. I think American audiences mostly know about Geralt from The Witcher video games. The answer's very simple, though, which is that the video games are based on the books. The video games are adaptations of the books. For me, it didn't make sense to make an adaptation of an adaptation of something. And what that does is it allows us to tell The Witcher story just in a different way. I think that a lot of video game fans are concerned that we're taking something from them. We're usurping something that's theirs. And the truth is, I love the video games. They're not going anywhere. They are insanely successful. I can only hope that our show is that successful. Video games aren't going anywhere and the books aren't going anywhere. This is just a third way to enjoy these same characters and this same world.
So in order to create this new entry point into The Witcher, Lauren started at the beginning.
Lauren: I tried to dive in as many ways as I could. So first of all, I read the books. I actually am one of these old school people who likes reading paper books, not, not e-books. So I bought all of the books. Yeah. They're just better, right? They just, they're more tactile. So I bought all of the books. It allows me to fold down corners of pages, highlight sections that I love. So my copies of, of The Witcher series are really dog-eared. The next thing that I do is actually listen to the audio books for a couple of reasons. One, I like sort of cementing the stories in my brain. If I listen to something on an audiobook first, it doesn't necessarily sink in. But listening to it after reading the books, I'm starting to hear the voices of these characters. And for me, by the way, pronunciations of their names and the places, it sort of allowed me to dig into the world a little bit deeper. One of the first things that I did, though, after I sold the show to Netflix is I got on a plane and went to Poland and met the author. And I got to be in the place where he wrote these books. And to me, that was a really important part of the process.
The journey to Poland was important because like Tomek mentioned earlier… there’s something about The Witcher that’s inherently Polish. It’s written by an author who was born in Poland just three years after World War II. And it’s full of Eastern European sensibilities that might not be clear if you didn’t grow up there.
Tomek: I think there are a couple of elements of Polish culture which, which are very well captured in the, in the books, and I think they are also quite nicely captured in the TV show. One is some of our, like, Slavic fairy tales, monsters, stories we heard as children. And of course, a very, very specific type of humor, which is rare, I think. It is very, very misleading to call Witcher comedy. It's not. It's it's a very, very dark drama moments. But one of the most important things when you live in Eastern Europe is that we were, we went through so many dark stuff in the past that we also realized that even in this darkest moments, people don't lose a sense of humor.
Geralt has that sense of humor, that dry wit. Even during life or death situations, he can crack a joke.
Elf (clip): Do you wanna die right now?
Geralt: As opposed to later?
Probably not how I’d respond if I were tied up and getting the crap beaten out of me.
Tomek sees other links between The Continent where the Witcher takes place, and his home country of Poland.
Tomek: Poland is a weird place because it's a big battlefield. Like for hundreds of years, it was, like, this big plane between Russia and Germany and armies were going back and for-forth all the time. So we had to develop our own feeling what is good, what is wrong? And the easiest way to describe it is that - and this, I think, very, very nicely told in the first episode - when Geralt says -
Geralt (clip): Evil is evil, Stregobor. Lesser. Greater. Middling. It's all the same.
That line is pulled straight from Andrzej’s Sapkowskis first book, The Last Wish, in a story called ‘The Lesser Evil.’ And that too, the concept of “lesser evil,” it vibes with Tomek’s experience growing up in Poland.
Tomek: For me, it's always a conflict between people who put ideology first over pe-, with the people who put people first. And...and whatever the ideology, if you, if you put ideology first and you can, and you can sacrifice lives of the people for the ideology, it can be a great ideology. It can be a beautiful plan, you know. But you have to kill a lot of people to achieve this plan. It's just wrong, because if you put people first. Ideologies are not that important, then. People are the most important. And Geralt is living to this code. This is, this may be the only code he's living...living to. That he doesn't care that maybe if you kill a hundred people, you will make world better for a million. Doesn't, doesn't matter because this, this hundred matters, actually. You don't do it.
This might be the only code that Geralt lives by— And when Lauren started writing the show, she wanted to unpack that, as well as get a better understanding of Geralt’s voice.
So while on that trip to Poland, Lauren spoke to Andrezj about his upbringing... and how it shaped the characters that he molded in The Witcher books.
Lauren: We spoke about when he started writing, why he started writing, who Geralt was in his mind. I personally believe that, that Geralt is...is him. I don't think he would agree with that. But that's, that's where I think that character comes from.
Andrzej is an adventurer and a wanderer, he’s traveled all over the world. And had the experience of not quite fitting in. Just like Geralt.
After meeting with the author, Lauren brought all of this new knowledge and understanding back to Los Angeles and assembled a writer’s room of seven. The band of writers are a mix of fantasy buffs, Witcher die-hards, and novices. Some from America, and some from Europe.
Lauren: Our first task, myself and the writers, were to take these thousands and thousands of pages and decide how to introduce our world to this world. How will our world best understand the continent? How will they understand Geralt and what a Witcher is? The politics of this universe, the various kingdoms, and then also make it enjoyable. How will we also plant in romance and love and friendship? And there's, there are strong familial bonds in The Witcher.
Lauren would be drawn to characters and storylines in the books ... but then, trying to write them all into a TV show presented some structural issues…
Lauren: The big thing that struck me when I was, when I was reading the books is that Ciri, our princess, princess Cirilla of Cintra, becomes a very large part of the story in Book 3, which is called Blood of Elves. It's the beginning of what's known as the saga. The more serialized storytelling. And part of me had actually considered, you know, kicking off the series in the saga because it is more serialized. It's sort of already baked in. You know, a series is kind of baked into it already. But I thought that the first two books of short stories had so much beautiful worldbuilding, really, really creating and expounding upon the foundation of this continent.
The short stories she’s speaking of include tales of Renfri, The Striga, and the dragon among others.
Almost all of these stories are entirely about Geralt of Rivia. NOT, Yennefer or Ciri—the other two characters that have drawn so many to the saga. Lauren knew she wanted to make sure not to omit them from this first season.
This required some clever problem solving on her part.
Lauren: So the first and probably fundamental shift that we made from the books is that we messed with the timeline a little bit. We chose non-linear storytelling so that we could start to tell stories about Geralt and Yennefer and Ciri simultaneously, even though they don't happen at the same time in the novels. Yennefer's story in the first season takes place over about 70 years, Geralt's takes place over about 20 years, and Ciri's takes place over about two weeks. And that way to me, we would get to know all of these characters in and of themselves on their own two feet, really build them as, as well-rounded and layered individuals before they ever met. And that to me is so much fun. Is because when people meet, they're, you know, they start to change each other. Interactions change people, relationships change people. And I wanted to know who these people were before those interactions happened. And so that's the biggest shift that we made as writers.
We’re definitely going to take a deep dive into how the writers wove Ciri and Yennefer’s timelines into the series, but we’ll do that in the next two episodes. For right now, we’re sticking with my guy Geralt.
One of the most exciting and daunting parts of adapting a book series is figuring out who is going to portray a character you’ve been reading about for decades.
Tomek: It's so easy to make Geralt, you know, this dark monster hunter, right? So easy. But it's not this character. This character, he will always say that, oh, he doesn't have a se-sense of humor, but he has. Right? And he will always say that I don't care. But he cares.
Tomek and Lauren, they needed someone who could play both sides of that coin. And then, maybe it was destiny, but Henry Cavill—who you might know as Superman from the DC Extended Universe— he heard that Netflix was adapting The Witcher. Turns out, he was a fan.
Lauren: Henry was introduced to Geralt through the video games, and then when he found that Netflix was making the show, he went and read all of the books. And this was ahead of us meeting for the first time. So he came into that first meeting, quite the scholar.
They auditioned several people for the role of Geralt of Rivia, but it wasn’t really a competition.
Tomek: Once he read it with this, a little bit of smirk, a little bit of, you know, he found this level, this very subtle element of dark humor in delivery. And I thought, oh, that's him.
The writers add details to Geralt’s look in the script. Things like, “a large-built mysterious man,” “head framed by white hair.” That kind of thing. But it was up to Henry Cavill and his two close collaborators to take those words and transform him into the silver-haired, spooky-eyed, monster-fighting badass.
Ailbhe: Hi, I'm Ailbhe Lemass, I'm the makeup artist to Mr. Cavill.
Jacqi: Hi there, I'm Jacqui Rathore and I'm the hairstylist for Mr. Cavill.
These two are Henry’s personal hair and makeup team. Who’ve been working with him for a couple of years. Rather than digging into the books, Ailbhe and Jacqui stuck to the script for inspiration.
Jacqi: I think really, for all of us, really, we didn't want...he shouldn't look too groomed or too, like, you know, he, he got up that morning and plaited his hair. Or, you know, made it look really nice. So it had to be just like a man of the woods, like a man of the woods that doesn't have a bath once a week. And he's a bit grubby and a bit grimy. And the hair had to reflect that, really.
Jacquie and Ailbhe aren’t just responsible for designing the wig Henry wears as Geralt, or putting makeup on his face to look dirty. They’re responsible for everything from his veins, to his scars, to his eyes. Henry had to wear different kinds of contacts for Geralt’s yellow eyes and for when they’re solid black.
Ailbhe: The black eyes completely covered his eyeball, and we had a lovely optician.
Jacqi: Sara.
Ailbhe: Sara, who was with him nearly the whole time, because even when he had the yellow eyes in, even if he was off camera, he wanted the yellow eyes in to help with the other actor.
Henry was that dedicated to this role. But prior to getting Henry in front of the camera, Alva and Jacqi were testing a variety of looks both for visibility and functionality.
Ailbhe: We had our first camera test and we were saying, oh, the wig has to be a bit darker and the makeup has to be more this and that. But we were still feeling quite nice, quite confident. And then the director said, well, can we pour a bucket of water over him now? And we went, what? He said, well, the first fight sequence is underwater. And we went, what?
Brandon: So what is -
Ailbhe: So that changes everything. That changes the products you use, it changes the way you probably have to sew the wig on as opposed to clip it on. But Henry did want to be pale. He wanted all the color out of his skin. We did put in a bit of shading. We used makeup that stayed on very well, even underwater.
Okay, quick question to you all listening… am I the ONLY one who didn’t know that there is makeup you can wear underwater? No? Okay, sorry, back to Ailbhe and Jacqi.
Brandon: If you had to sort of rank this in difficulty to do what you all do, how high does it rank? Because this feels like...
Ailbhe: In 35 years, it's probably the hardest job I've done.
Brandon: Wow.
Jacqi: Same for me. It's the hardest job I've ever done.
Ailbhe: Looking after Henry is number one. We love him to bits and we want to be there for him and we want to make it perfect. He wants his take perfect every time. We want his take perfect every time. That's the object.
Jacqui: When he was out of his costume and out of the wig, he almost looked more weird, more strange to us as himself.
They’d spent six months with Henry as Geralt almost every day. And whether you had worked with Henry for years beforehand, or you’d never met him before … his transformation was remarkable. As Tomek puts it, Henry would walk onto the set…
Tomek: And he was him.
Way before Henry was even cast as or transformed into Geralt, Lauren and the writers started building their Witcher. When they were writing the pilot, they leaned heavily on the Witcher short story The Lesser Evil. So to better understand the adaptation process, we’re going to dissect both the pilot and that short story. Starting with maybe the most obvious question.
Lauren: What is a Witcher? And Henry can give a very, very long explanation to what a Witcher is. But a Witcher is very simply a monster hunter, a mutated human who has special skills that enable him to kill monsters. And so I thought, what's a better way to introduce the character than to have him killing a monster when we first find him?
So they kicked things off with a battle against the Kikimora…. This eight legged, nine foot tall spider-like creature
Lauren: In the books, we actually never see Geralt kill the Kikimora. He actually arrives in Blaviken with the Kikimora on his donkey. But we don't get to see him kill it.
This is one of the key elements of Lauren’s adaptation: instead of a direct adaptation of the books, she’ll take something that’s mentioned in the books, like this battle with the Kikimore from the short story “The Lesser Evil,” and she’ll run with it.
Lauren: If you read a paragraph in the book, what are, what's the sentence that the author deleted? What was the sentence that there wasn't room for? The book was already 350 pages long. What would have been said if it was 400 pages long? I like to believe that there was a two-page scene about him killing that Kikimora before he walks into town. And so those are the, those are the pages that I wrote.
So when the show pops off, the very first scene, we’re in an eerie marsh and we see a fawn. The water is still… but then it begins to bubble. Something’s going on beneath the surface. And then all of sudden, all eight giant legs of the Kikimore SHOOTS out of the water.
Vlad: We spend almost one month about this fight.
This is Vladimir Furdik. He’s the fight coordinator on The Witcher. Now, the voice might not be recognizable, but if you’ve seen Game of Thrones, then you’ve definitely seen Vlad… and that’s because he played The Night King. Yes, THE Night King. But on The Witcher, he’s responsible for designing and choreographing the fights—and there’s a lot of them. In order to do that, he has to think about how Geralt, a 100 year-old magically enhanced professional monster slayer, would fight.
Vlad: I thought he should be a fighter who already predict that three second before when he's going to kill somebody else, or smash somebody, he really predict what he doing. So he's fight. It's kind of like...should looks like more like very comfortable and kind of like ballet.
One of the most important fights for him, was this kikimora scene. In proper Slavic folklore, Kikimoras are anthropomorphic creatures comprised of many different animals, and they’re relatively peaceful. But this Kikimora was fierce … and trying to take down Geralt.
Vlad started figuring out the fight where he always does, in his gym.
Vlad: I just see, I just stay in the in the gym and I thinking how I can prepare to fight, you know, and because kikimora, she was, she's three met-, three meters tall and she have eight legs.
Okay, so Vlad acts out the scenes he’s choreographing, which makes sense... But how do you do that with a spider monster that doesn’t actually exist?
The answer’s simple: You create one.
Vlad went to the store, bought some long plastic pipes and brought them to work and tried to make his own homemade Kikimora.
Vlad: So I bring six people. I put them on the table.
And he gives these six people, who are all crowded together on a table, a set of pipes. The pipes are taped together, creating a kind of mock-joint to represent the spider leg.
And each one of the stunt guys have to hold it out, moving independently of one another, but also near one another, clustered together.
Vlad: Which looks like spider legs, and I just...I just stay under the legs and I started thinking and start to build the fight.
Vlad thinks about how a spider would move, how Geralt would try to take him down. The fight happens so quickly in the show, that I had to watch it at ¼ speed.
But once I did, I could see how Vlad brought Geralt’s ability to predict his enemy’s movements to this spider monster.
There’s this one moment, right before another leg tries to strike his upper body, where Geralt ducks, like a game of double dutch. He stands up, facing the kikimora, shuffling right to left like a boxer, figuring out where the spider will go next. When the scene’s slowed down, you can see Geralt’s calculations. There’s so much detail, so much choreography that went into this two minute scene.
And it started in Vlad’s gym, where they fiddled with this fight, changing it six or seven times before showing the director.
Vlad: Then we shoot other previews, how the fight should be looks like. And then we showed the Henry and we teach the Henry every movement.
Lauren: Henry actually does all of his own stunt work. He does not have a double. Every time that Geralt is on screen, Henry is on screen, even if it's just his hand. No one else acts as Geralt.
Brandon: In your history, is that normal?
Lauren: No, that is not normal. You know, for various reasons. Obviously, we have Henry's safety to look out for. That's our, like, first consideration. Everything always has to be safe. And he needs to be protected. But what I find is that Geralt's physical job, killing monsters, is a very important part of who he is. And so Henry didn't feel like he could fully embody Geralt without doing that aspect, too.
Which means that once one of the monster’s pincers gets him and pins Geralt down, Henry is really under water. And that’s when Geralt drops one of his swords.
Geralt’s swords are almost as iconic as his white hair and yellow eyes.
Nick: Anything that was Henry's weapon, whenever I came up with it or the idea for it, I would always bounce it off Henry and go, look, it's going to be like this. We're doing that. What do you think?
Nick Jeffries is the show’s armorer… Basically he’s tasked with researching and designing every weapon you see on screen. Actually, even the ones you don’t see.
Nick: So if you take the kikimora fight, that is a fight that encompasses everything Henry has. So he has his real swords. He has a soft rubbers, he has hard rubbers,
He means rubber swords...
it encompasses everything. So different parts of the shot literally maybe from angle to angle can change from the real sword to the rubber sword to the soft rubber. Then back again. And so on.
The rubber swords are used for safety. They also use “half swords” which are exactly what they sound like – swords with the top half missing. Visual Effects adds the tips on later.
I saw early cuts of the show before the swords were complete and it’s amazing how real the actors can make fights look when half their weapon is missing.
And even these half swords and rubber swords … Nick the armorer carefully researches how they’ll look.
He’ll take the time period into account.
Nick: I'm going to use the word medieval because we're in that world of being a medieval fantasy.
He also thinks about the type of person brandishing the weapon.
Nick: Geralt is obviously a Witcher who is prepared to put a lot into his swords. If this was real, you'd want to say you can buy a cheap sword made by a blacksmith or you can buy a very expensive sword made by very good armorer. He obviously goes to the top end. He has the Rolls Royce of swords, which obviously says a lot about him. He, he is very serious about what he does. So he would have put a lot of money into his swords.
Like Geralt’s silver sword in the Kikimore fight scene.
In the script, it just says, “A SILVER SWORD bisects the screen. Maybe it’s just the reflection of the moon, but the sword seems to have a light of its own.”
Nick had to take that description and create it. He worked with Lauren and the art department, but mostly he did his own research. Nick would go to museums in London, and also in Hungary, where they were filming.
Nick: I went to the National Museum there, because we were so looking for a little bit of a Slavic touch to everything. So I had to look at a few reference things there and a few typically Slavic decorations and suchlike. I've even taken ideas from garden fences where I've seen something on a metal fence and gone, that's quite a nice idea. I'm going to build that into the sword one day. Just a little bit of artistic metalwork or or something like that.
It’s that sword, a hulking wide sword that shines, even underwater, that Geralt drops while fighting the kikimore.
But of course, Geralt is able to get his sword back. He uses the Kikimore’s movements to his advantage. He lets the Kikimore lift him up, with the belief that she’s got her kill– and then he delivers a final, fatal blow with his silver sword right through her skull.
Lauren knew she wanted to start with a monster fight. But picking where to begin Geralt’s story was more challenging than that.
Lauren: So one of the interesting things that you face when you are crafting a series, crafting the first season is where to start your main character. We have Geralt. He's been a Witcher for almost 100 years already. Where is he at? How does he feel? Is he over it? And the answer is yes. He's kind of over it. And then how do we change the course of his story within that first episode so that now the audience is understanding not just where he's come from, but where's he, where he's going and why?
Lauren decided they needed more than just a monster to demonstrate everything Geralt was going through. They needed a character who could talk.
Lauren: Renfri really was the perfect character to change his course. And so that's a story that I knew that I needed to tackle.
So remember how the kikimore scene is just mentioned at the beginning of Andrzej Sapkowski’s story, The Lesser Evil? Well the rest of that story is all about Renfri and the wizard Stregoboar.
Here are the cliffnotes. Stregobor asks Geralt to kill Renfri, a beautiful woman who the wizard thinks is a monster. Meanwhile, Renfri wants Geralt to kill Stregobor, because the wizard took her from her home as a child. They both claim that killing the other person would be the lesser evil. But we all know that’s not Geralt’s style.
Geralt (clip): If I have to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose it all.
So in the books, Geralt first meets up with Stregobor, not Renfri. He goes to Stregobor’s tower of illusion. And yes, the naked women picking apples does come straight from the text. Geralt goes to this tower, what the writers called “Eden on Crack,” hoping Stregobor will buy the dead kikimora.
Geralt (clip): You don't want my monster. You want me to kill yours.
Stregobor (clip): Very clever. Indeed.
Geralt (clip): What kind?
Stregobor (clip): Worst kind. The humankind.
Lauren and the writers had Geralt meet Renfri blissfully unaware of Stregobor’s theory– that Renfri is a monster because of the curse of the black sun...
Stregobor (clip): Have you ever heard of the curse of the black sun? First full eclipse in twelve hundred years? It marked the imminent return of Lilit, demon goddess of the night sent to exterminate the human race.
Okay, so besides changing who Geralt met first, there’s another big shift that Lauren and the writers took in this episode and across the series.
In the books? When Stregobor tells Geralt about this curse? There’s several pages of dialogue between the two of them, discussing their opinions on the matter.
Lauren: One of the very first things that Henry and I discovered when shooting the first episode is that our Geralt doesn't need to talk as much as Geralt in the books. I had written a lot of words, like a lot of words for him. And what we realized is that our Geralt is a little more stoic, doesn't always respond. He...we like to make fun of his grunts. He answers in grunts a lot. That's one of, I would say, the biggest changes. The other things we really tried to stay true to. Geralt's dry sense of humor was really important to us and we tried to stay true to that.
So instead of pages of dialogue with Geralt and Stregobor debating back and forth… we get this:
Stregabor (clip): According to the Wise Mage, multiple lanes path was to be prepared by 60 women wearing gold crowns who would fill the river valleys with blood.
Geralt (clip): Doesn't rhyme. All good predictions rhyme.
The actual line in the book is “All decent predictions rhyme.” Followed by a paragraph of exposition, that Geralt delivers in one look on the show.
After he leaves Stregobor, Geralt goes back to the woods with his horse. Lauren knew this was a prime moment for another book-based-Geraltism.
Geralt (clip): I talk to my horse.
His relationship with his horse, Roach.
Renfri (clip): That's sad.
Geralt (clip): Is it?
Lauren: It's funny because Roach, first of all, is a she. It's a mare. And also, when Roach dies, as horses do, he gets another horse and then he also names her Roach. So they have a very interesting, interesting relationship. But one of the very first things that I did in the pilot was I crafted a conversation between Geralt and Roach. I have Geralt talk to his horse.
Geralt (clip): You know, what Vesemir would say? Witchers shouldn't play at being white knights. We shouldn't try and uphold the law. We don't show off. We get paid in coin. And he's right.
Lauren: And I remember early readers read the script and were like, are you sure? This is not Mr. Ed. Um, the television show. Like, do we really want a horse-man conversation? And it's actually one of my favorite parts of the pilot. And I think it's, I think it's important that our loner lead have someone to talk to, even if that, even if it's a horse.
Geralt and Renfri end up running into each other again in the woods. She tells him she has plans to leave the town, that she won’t go after the wizard. And the two end up sleeping together, which holds true to the book. But what’s unique to the show, is the hallucination he has—a dream that seems like a prediction… even if it doesn’t rhyme.
Renfri (clip): You're in the market covered in blood. You say you can't choose, that you had to, and you'll know if you were right. Your reward will be a stoning. And you will run. You will try to outrun the guard in the woods, but you cannot. She's your destiny.
Geralt (clip): Renfri -
Destiny is one of the show’s core themes. Now I’m not co-signing this, but if you were to drink a shot every time you hear the word “Destiny” ...well you’d be at least six shots deep.
Destiny Montage
Lauren: One of the first things that I did when I was reading the books is I looked up the difference between fate and destiny, which I think that we tend to use interchangeably and they're actually very different things. Fate is a predetermined end. Fate is no matter what you do, you are going to, you know, end up with a husband and two kids and a dog. And you'll live in Ohio forever. Um… Why destiny is different, is destiny means that, that we as humans are part of what happens. We make choices that determine where we're going to end up.
In “The Lesser Evil” Geralt he ends up making a choice that takes him closer to his destiny.
Lauren: At the end of the day, Gerald kills Renfri.
Lauren: One of the things that we we talked a lot about is for a man who was built to be a killing machine, how can a kill change him? And one of the things that Stregobor says to him is...
Stregobor (clip): You made a choice. And you'll never know if it was the right one.
Lauren: I like to think that in that moment that the audience will step back and think, well, what was it the right one? And I am perfectly fine, if some people thin-think it was the right decision and some people think it wasn't. I personally think that as soon as Geralt does that, he regrets it. And the death of Renfri is kind of what changes his journey because he is forced now to think about why he kills and what more might be out there for him beyond being a Witcher, which sets up his eventual story with Ciri.
That’s where we’ll pick up next time. Over the next two episodes, we’re looking at how the writers, crew, and the cast themselves adapted Yennefer and Ciri. We’ll keep exploring their world and the real people who brought it all to life. Next time on Behind The Scenes of The Witcher, we’re diving into Yennefer’s backstory.
Lauren: These women are based on women that he saw walking around in, in real life.
Tomek: Lauren knows that I was terrified. I was like, Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Alex: I had the hair makeup department with me and I said, bring a lot of blood. And we just were basically dumping buckets of blood.
Anya: And I don’t know, I didn't know what was going to come out my mouth until I - until I screamed. And whatever did happen on that day came really organically.
Behind The Scenes of The Witcher is a Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios production. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins. Make sure to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. It really does help other people find it. Thanks for listening.