Yennefer of Vengerberg goes from being a hunchback sleeping in a pigsty, to a powerful, beautiful mage. But what is the cost of her transformation? Actress Anya Chalotra, director Alex Garcia Lopez, and the crew of The Witcher walk us through Yennefer’s 70 year story.
Yennefer of Vengerberg goes from being a hunchback sleeping in a pigsty, to a powerful, beautiful mage. But what is the cost of her transformation? Actress Anya Chalotra, director Alex Garcia Lopez, and the crew of The Witcher walk us through Yennefer’s 70 year story.
When Lauren Hissrich was asked to adapt The Witcher into a show for Netflix, she faced a Geralt-like dilemma ... forced to choose between two distinct paths.
She could adapt the short stories, which are more about Geralt’s journey through The Continent. Or she could adapt the saga.
The set of serialized novels that follow not just Geralt, but also the two characters that really pulled Lauren into the books: Yennefer of Vengerberg
Yennefer (clip): Nobody smart plays fair
And Cirilla The Lion Cub of Cintra.
Ciri (clip): Maybe he’s the other edge of my destiny.
Lauren: I was in the shower one morning, where all good ideas come from
This is Lauren, The Witcher’s showrunner, executive producer and writer.
Lauren: and all of the sudden I thought, what if I told the stories of Geralt, Ciri, and Yennefer the way that did?
You know, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s award winning film about the Battle of Dunkirk. (Yes, the movie with Harry Styles. And while we all love Harry, that’s not what Lauren was thinking about.) Dunkirk is told in a non-linear fashion. We see three separate missions, with three completely different timelines, but all given equal real estate on the big screen.
So Lauren wondered… “What if I did that with The Witcher? What if I were able to adapt both the short stories and introduce the saga… all in season one?”
Lauren: And I hopped out of the shower and I found my husband and I said, do you think that's crazy? Do you think this could work? And he looked at me like it was a little bit of crazy, which it was. But also it was one of the first things that made me really excited about telling this story. Fooling with the narrative and making it more interesting and being able to then create and craft all of these stories the way that I wanted them to.
Lauren wanted to weave the timelines of her three main characters: Geralt’s, which is a 20 year journey. Yennefer’s, which evolves over 70 years. And Ciri’s, which takes place in just two weeks. Now this isn’t a common practice, or an easy feat.
So she brought her ambitions to Tomek Bagiński, the series’ executive producer. Tomek is a huge fan of The Witcher novels and he’s also the dude who initially got in touch with the author to turn the books into a series.
Tomek: Lauren's approach to actually tell the story of Ciri and, and Yennefer and Geralt altogether was really amazing. It was something like, oh, that's refreshing. It's risky, but refreshing and fun. Let’s do it!
Okay cool. But now Lauren and the writers just had to figure out how to actually pull it off. And to better understand how they did it, we’re gonna take a look at the timeline of a single character – Yennefer.
How did the writers decide where to begin her story? When would she and Geralt cross paths? How do you communicate the passage of time to the audience?
This is Behind The Scenes of The Witcher. Episode Two: Yennefer of Vengerberg. I’m your host Brandon Jenkins. And we’re not gonna waste any time so…
Tomek: Let’s do it!
Of all the women in Andrzej Sapowski’s Witcher, Lauren and the writers knew they absolutely wanted to dial in on the character of Yennefer. This alluring, strong minded sorceress who goes through a major transformation.
She was one of the starkest examples of something Lauren noticed while reading The Witcher.
Lauren: The female characters are incredibly strong in the books, so strong that actually as a reader, I was surprised because they were, you know, written in the 80s. At first. And I thought, well, they're obviously, there's, there's a level of feminism in these books that is quite unexpected.
When Lauren traveled to Poland and spoke with author Andrzej Sapkowski, she talked with him about these strong female characters.
Lauren: And digging in with Sapkowski, he explained to me the role of women after World War II in Poland and beyond, where a lot of the men had been killed in conflict and women who had long sort of been the center of their home lives suddenly also had to become the center of their communities and the center of their work lives. They were the breadwinners. They are the ones who were allowing the generations below them to survive.
Sapkowski knew all this because he spent his childhood in 1950’s Poland… it was personal.
Lauren: Sapkowski talked a little bit about his mother to me, but also just about the other women that he knew in life and said that, that Yennefer, and, and Ciri, and Tissaia de Vries, Philippa Eillheart. These women are based on women that he saw walking around in, in real life. And that, I thought was such a stunning part of the story.
Yennefer, in particular, stood out to Lauren.
Lauren: In the novels, we meet her as a fully grown, powerful mage. However, she does refer to her past a few times. There are a couple of sentences. And that's all there is. There's a couple of sentences in the book where she's reflecting on her past or Geralt is, is surmising things about her past.
You can spot a reference to Yennefer in the short story, “Something More.” It’s mentioned that she’s at the Battle of Sodden. And then, in the story “The Last Wish,” this is what Sapowski writes when Geralt first meets Yennefer:
“The Witcher approached, watchful and silent. He saw her left shoulder, slightly higher than her right. Her nose, slightly too long. Her lips, a touch too narrow. Her chin, receding a little too much. Her brows a little too irregular. Her eyes….He saw too many details. Quite unnecessarily.”
Lauren: And the writers and I culled through all of those...all of the sentences, pulled them together, and then actually crafted a story from that.
This approach—being able to craft a story from these threads of information—dials back to Lauren’s theory on adaptation: Which is that it’s about adding to the original, not taking away from it.
Lauren: 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?
Sure, Lauren and her writing team could have encapsulated Yennefer’s backstory as a single-episode flashback. But that’s not their style. Instead, they built out Yennefer’s timeline—from her arrival at Aretuza academy all the way to the Battle of Sodden— across the entirety of the first season.
Tomek: All that Aretuza storyline.
This is Tomek again, the series’ executive producer and OG Witcher fan.
Tomek: All her character arc, when she's going through this horrible change and all the things which are happening basically 'til the last episode are developed in the writers room in Lauren's team. And Lauren knows that I was terrified. I was like, Oh, my God. Oh, my God. As a fan, as somebody who actually knew the books, there were so many new elements that I was thinking, OK, how the fans will respond? How people will get into this story?
Lauren and her team made sure to maintain the author’s spirit: the darkness, the contemplation, the humor— Which gave them the freedom to expand on the world created by the books.
Lauren: To me, for fans, I think it will be fun to watch Yennefer develop and say, oh, I recognize what was wrong with her before her transformation. Or I recognize her reference to her abusive father. But then we actually get to see her abusive father. We actually get to see her experiences in her disabled body and see what that's like for her. And to me, it's an added bonus of being able to do this on television.
Lauren and her crew love taking creative leaps, like adding to Yenn’s backstory. BUT, it does create a bit of a hurdle for casting.
See, Yennenfer begins the season as a 14-year-old girl… but by the end of the season, she’s somewhere in her 70s—even though she doesn’t look it, due to her anti-aging magic. If we could all be so lucky...
So the casting director, Sophie Holland has to find someone who is young, but can play old, and can go through a massive transformation on screen.
Fortunately for Sophie, while in the midst of casting another project, she met a memorable young actress, straight out of drama school. Anya Chalotra.
Sophie: So, listen, I can tell you a story about Anya, which is the first ever professional audition she had was with me. And she brought her dad to the audition and she was mortified. She was like, well, dad, don't come in, don't come in, but, like, honestly, her dad is to die for, I swear. But I just knew from that first meeting, I just knew from that first meeting that we would have this journey together, that somehow our journeys were linked by destiny. I know it sounds crazy and you probably think I'm insane to say it, but I really do think that.
So when Sophie got the job casting The Witcher, she knew she had to bring Anya back in. They filmed her audition, and then Sophie sent the footage to Lauren.
Sophie: But I never say much about it when I'm kind of excited. So Lauren, I think, knows by the kind of - because I haven't said anything that I kind of feel something. And I sent it off to Lauren and she was like, oh, I really liked this girl. And I was like, you ain't seen nothing yet.
But it wasn’t a clean sweep just yet. Because Yennefer’s character is so dynamic and goes through a ton of changes, they wanted to audition Anya and others with a TON of different sides. To see how she would play young Yenn versus older Yenn.
Quick film definition– sides are the scenes the actors read during auditions to get a feel of the part.
Every time Anya and others would return for an audition, Sophie would record it … and send tapes to the team, including Tomek.
Tomek: It's like seeing, like, a rare gem, like a rare diamond. I remember I was, I think, in L.A. The Internet was not great because I really don't like downloading the casting tapes. And I was like watching it in the hotel room in the Internet. And they asked my wife, hey, do you see what I'm seeing? And she, she saw Anya and said, oh, my God, she's Yennefer.
Anya: I feel like I have a lot of Yennefer in me and there are a lot of things that we explored together.
This, of course, is Anya Chalotra. She says there was a lot about Yennefer that excited her.
Anya: Her fearlessness.The fact that she was a sorceress. The fact that she refuses to be a fancy stereotype. She's very confident in her body. And the fact that, you know, we were exploring her backstory in the series, that was really interesting. I mean, that was what drew me to the character as well, because I wanted to know what was underneath this cold exterior.
Yennefer’s frigid demeanor is the result of her rough upbringing. When we first meet her, she’s just a 14-year-old with a twisted spine. Milling about a pig pen, while being harassed by local bullies.
Girl: Now it smells of pig shit.
Boy: You’ve been spying of us, you creep?
Girl, Yeah, of course! Look at her; no one’s ever kissed her.
Boy: Can she even stand up straight to do it?
Girl: Where you going, crooked girl? We can teach you.
She looks drastically different from the Yennefer we see later on.
Csilla: Anya Chalotra's a beautiful girl. So it was a hard thing to make her look ugly. But we tried our best.
This is Csilla Blake-Horvath. She takes care of Hair and Make Up for everyone not named Henry Cavill. And when it came to Yennefer, she spent a lot of time ideating and designing her looks.
To make Yennefer’s character less... gorgeous, they gave Anya a short, unflattering wig, complete with blunt bangs to wear.
Then she got dental prosthetics to make her chin bigger. And the writers knew that they wanted Yennefer to have a hunchback.
Csilla: Originally we talked about a birthmark on her face, which I did a graphic design for. But then, because of the hunchback, because of the dental prosthetics, the birthmark plus the wig, it was too much on one person.
For the hunchback and dental prosthetics, Csilla and her team looked at old medical records and photos for inspiration.
Csilla: How somebody would look with that kind of hunchback and then we just go with few designs like graphic designs for levels of hunchbacks, for example, or level of the face disorder, or how would the jaw look like if it was like a little bit twisted to one side or another. So we just check these kind of images, real images, and then we start making, like, graphic designs.
The next step is to have her team make molds of the designs. Now, since Anya wouldn’t be able to stand up straight with all prosthetics, they had to run some tests with her. To make sure she could handle wearing whatever they created for 10-12 hours at a time.
Csilla: We had to glued it on, so we have to test her skin, how it reacts, wearing it for like 10 hours, and how it affects her acting.
Anya: The prosthetics, it completely...the...just like looking at the floor a lot. And it completely changed the way I relate to people. I felt inferior. I felt sad and scared. Yeah, I-I found that that really helped develop - you get into, get into the younger Yennefer's skin.
And what we find out about young Yennefer right away is that she’s something magical.
Back in the pig sty where we first meet Yennefer, when she’s being pinned down by those bullies….
Girl: Where you going, crooked girl? We can teach you!
Yennefer: Leave me alone.
Girl: I heard your father makes you sleep with the pigs. You’re family doesn’t even want you.
Yennefer: Stop, stop!
Suddenly… she’s not in the pig sty anymore.
Yennefer: How did I get here?
Istredd: Well it looks to me like you portaled here.
Yennefer: I what?
She’s in a dark cave, at the Aretuza Academy, with a young student who’s studying there. And yeah, she portaled there. Like Magic.
Yennefer was unaware that she could do magic—which, in the world of The Witcher, is referred to as chaos. Here’s Lauren again.
Lauren: One of the things that we delved into at the very beginning is how to portray magic, which has been done in every different version of entertainment, but always ends up feeling like an easy escape from challenging situations. If you can just poof yourself out of any place, then, well, what's the fun in that? It takes the stakes way down. So one of the things that we have worked into our world is that there's a cost to practicing magic. In every situation where a mage will choose to perform magic, they will lose something of themselves from very big things or very small things. Sometimes they'll just get tired, their nose will start bleeding, or their ears will start bleeding and they'll actually be sucking their life force out.
Think about the scene where Yennefer’s classmate Fringilla tries to make a rock float. Her hands ends up shriveling and blackening from the energy she’s using.
Fringilla (clip): I’m doing it.
Sabrina: Your hand….
Fringilla: *screaming*
Tissaia: This is the balance, demonstrated beautifully. Thank you, Fringilla.
Lauren: If they kept practicing magic long enough, they would die.
Lauren wanted to differentiate The Witcher from more familiar trademarks that occupy the fantasy genre. There’s no magic wands… no one stirs a cauldron.
Lauren: My children are, are huge fans of Harry Potter. So we've read all the books, we've seen all the movies. And that's something that we actually tried to sort of shy away from, is this beautiful world of magic and the idea that everything is super exciting and new and you can have all the power in the world.
Instead, Lauren focused on capturing the essence of Sapskowski’s brand of fantasy: something much more nuanced and dark, with real consequences.
Lauren: The Academy of Aretuza is cut throat.
This dark, harsh vision of magic … it’s built into the history of Aretuza, and the building itself, really.
Andrew: You know, Aretuza. You know, in the world of The Witcher is it was built by the Elder races.
This is Andrew Laws, he’s the production designer. Which means, he’s tasked with figuring out what the world of The Witcher actually looks like. For Andrew, his inspiration always starts with the story itself. And when it came to Aretuza, he leaned into the idea that the school was built by elves.
Istredd (clip): Elven mages taught the first humans how to turn chaos into magic. And then, the humans slaughtered them.
Andrew: That architecture had to be an important part of that. So there's a lot of discussion about what we wanted to do with elven architecture and where we wanted to go with it and how we wanted to ground that.
You know … Elven architecture … whimsical, graceful elves living in mushrooms or making cookies in some treehouse. Andrew didn’t want any of that.
Andrew: It was important that we...we didn't fall into the trope of, you know, elven architecture being this sort of art nouveau, softer, delicate architecture. We felt that it would be more interesting to go the route of having this strength and this grounding and rooting in the world.
Andrew needed Aretuza to feel ancient, almost tribal in its appearance. So he looked toward ancient Mayan and Egyptian architecture. Also the environment itself helped to shape the look. They scouted this HUGE rock off the coast of the Canary Islands. It was jagged, with waves crashing against it. It was perfect.
The VFX team built Aretuza out of the rock, and in order to connect this nature made structure with the building, he added a ton of earthy, mineral like materials to the sets: like red sandstone, which is originally from Scotland.
Andrew: I really enjoyed, you know, the idea of utilizing the red sandstone for that environment. One, because I felt it was it was very grounded, it was very earthed. I felt that related very well to where this architecture would have come from. But a lot of it has to do with my parents are from Glasgow. And that's the red sandstone sort of came from there. And I like being able to cross purpose those two things.
The end product of Andrew’s work is a sinister, beautiful, hard school. But don’t get me wrong, Aretuza has it’s feeling of majesty, Anya felt that walking on set as Yennefer.
Anya: I remember being feeling quite, quite magic, I suppose. With all the plants and high ceilings, and it felt like, it felt like a school.
Lauren: Aretuza is a place where you come. You exist. You work hard. If you make it, great. You're a mage for the rest of your life. You transform. And that's, that's what you become. If you don't make it, you die.
If you don’t ascend, your life as a human is over. You transform and spend the rest of your life powering the school for other students. As an eel.
Yennefer (clip): You turned my friend into a slug.
Tissaia: An eel. Come, push your friend into the pool.
And in the event you don’t get turned into an eel, you’ll find yourself going to a kingdom and working as an advisor to a royal family. Yennefer is set to go back home to Aiden, and advise the king there.
But before a mage leaves school for their new kingdom, she has to go through a physical transformation called enchantment. And it’s where Yennefer makes the biggest sacrifice of her life.
Tissaia (clip): There is not a person alive that does not look into the mirror and see some of sort of deformity. Except for us. We remake ourselves in our terms. The world has no say in it.
In his original text of ‘The Last Wish,’ Andrzej Sapowski’s short story, he breaks down how enchantment happens:
“If the child passed the first years of training, magic entered into the equation: straightening and evening out legs, repairing bones which had badly knitted, patching harelips, removing scars, birthmarks, and pox scars. The young sorceress would become attractive because the prestige of her profession demanded it.
Lauren and the team, took this one passage … and built an entire episode out of it; Complete with a mad scientist slash doctor slash sorcerer
Clip: Let me be candid, you are a first draft of what nature intended, yes? Lucky for you, I am the final artist.
Lauren: Well what we wanted to do is take the idea of a fairy godmother turning you into a princess and flip that on its head.
It’s a sort of fucked up bippity-boppity-boo moment
Clip: Every girl I enchant leaves Aretuza a living work of art. Hm? No matter how challenging the clay.
Lauren: What we learn is it's a really brutal, physical, bloody process that has a really high cost involved to it.
That cost? It’s the ability to reproduce, to bear children. The magical surgery removes your reproductive organs and allows you to look beautiful, or at least what society usually considers beautiful. For Yennefer and the writers, that choice presented a conflict.
Lauren: Yennefer exhibits some physical disabilities when we first meet her, and we didn't want to just assume that Yennefer wanted to be beautiful. That that was her big goal in life. You know, she wanted to not feel these deformities, but instead be beautiful. It just felt like too simple of a way to handle this character.
Istredd: What do you want?
Yennefer: Remember that scared girl who tumbled at your feet in this cave totally unaware of her power? I want to return to Aedirn and never be her again.
Lauren: I think that what Yenn is going through is that she feels this innate power inside, but she feels like the world is not seeing it because the world doesn't see her because of her disabilities. So we actually have her debate for a long time about whether or not she wants to go through with enchantment, and what it could do for her.
Beauty is not the only factor in Yennefer’s decision. Because that decision isn’t wholly up to her. The council of mages are the ones who are responsible for the fates of Yennefer and her schoolmates. They all sit down and decide which kingdom Yennefer will be sent to.
Stregabor (clip): What about your hunchback prodigy, how’s her spine?
This is Stregobor, remember him? We met this wizard in his Garden of Eden-Tower of Illusion back in the first episode, which technically happens years after THIS council scene in episode three— you can see how the writers made Yennefer, Geralt and Ciri’s stories all connect to one another from their different timelines.
Anyway, Stregobor tells the council that Yennefer is quarter elf, which would be a problem in the kingdom she was supposed to be in… so they vote to send her to Nilfgaard instead.
Yennefer is livid. She misses her enchantment and initiation, while trying to concoct a plan to go to Aedirn.
It all comes to a head back in the cave where she first learned of her powers, where she first met Istredd, her lover at Aretuza who secretly spies on her for Stregobor.
Yenn: My world is cruel and predictable. You enter, you survive, you die.
Istredd: You know victimhood is not your color.
Yenn: Nor heroism yours.
Istredd: You’re just angry because you lost your chance to be beautiful.
Yenn: I want to be powerful.
Istredd: Seen and adored with everyone watching.
Yenn: It is what I’m owed.
Anya: She is driven by her insecurity and her need for unconditional love and to be the strongest version of herself and to have that reflected on her outsides.
Yennefer is not going to let other people’s perception of her blood or her body dictate her future. She’s going to go through with enchantment. No matter the cost.
Yennefer (clip): You claim to be a great artist. Prove it.
Yennefer bursts into the surgical room while the sorcerer who performs all the enchantments is packing up.
Mage: I need time to prepare the herbs.
Yenn: That won’t be necessary.
Mage: Don’t be foolish, you can’t be awake during the procedure.
Yenn: I can.
Alex: I call it the rebirth throughout the whole time we're doing it
Alex Garcia Lopez is a director who’s worked on shows like Daredevil and Luke Cage. And he’s the one who brought this episode to life.
Again, we see the multiple timelines of The Witcher serve a narrative purpose. Yennefer’s enchantment scene is intercut with Geralt fighting the striga, the monster that’s really a cursed little girl. Even though these two scenes are happening in different timelines, we can see their paralleled transformations. Geralt goes against the norm and wants to save the child within this monster, rather than kill it, like everyone expects from him.
And Yennefer’s trying to save someone too … herself.
Alex: Of Yennefer’s entire seasonal arc, this is the time where she eventually kind of took it a step further and decides to take destiny into her own hands.
Yennefer (clip): Leave my eyes. These as well
Yennefer is referring to the scars on her wrists from where she had attempted suicide. She’s strapped to a medieval looking chair, waiting for the wizard surgeon to begin. And he does, by taking out her uterus.
Yennefer (clip): *screaming*
This scene is actually perfect for Alex to direct. He’s known for a very specific visual style.
Alex: I like things to be quite wet, as they call it in the industry, which means very sweaty and muddy and bloody and things break and sort of chaos.
Alex: I had the hair makeup department with me and I said, bring a lot of blood. And I don't think they understood me when I said that. They ran out pretty quickly and then I was like, no, more, more, more. And we just were basically dumping buckets of blood.
If this scene made you think of Carrie… then you’d be correct. It turns out that the movie based on Stephen King’s haunting novel about a vengeful, high school misfit was one of Alex’s visual references.
They filmed all of this on what’s called a closed set because of the intimacy of the surgery. Not only is Anya nude throughout the scene, but it’s also extremely emotional. The only people on set were Alex, Anya, and a few crew. The “wetness” of it all, the blood and sweat, it helped Anya go deeper into the emotions. Because of course, she’s not really being operated on. Alex also helps set the mood by blaring dramatic classical music. There’s candles burning everywhere, and Yennefer is sitting in a literal ring of fire. So yeah… It’s intense.
Mage chanting during the enchantment.
Anya: Until I was strapped in that chair, I didn't know what that felt like. I hadn't rehearsed that. And I don't know I didn't know what was going to come out my mouth until I - until I screamed. And, and, and whatever did happen on that day came really organically.
Yennefer (clip): *screaming*
Brandon: It 100 percent comes through because there's a fair amount of yelling in the show. Those screams, I was like, oh shit, like, it just feels, um...it feels human, even though it's not something you've maybe even heard before in real life.
Anya may have never gone through this level of excruciating pain before. So during the filming of this extreme scene, she channeled deep emotion from older women that she knew.
Anya: You know what it felt like? My Indian heritage. I, you know, my, all my buas, I remember hearing that sound of them howling and that is what I go to when I think about what pain is.
It was an emotional scene to see on the screen and on set.
Alex: I get very - I get very emotional as well. So I'm just sort of fist pumping into the air and screaming without screaming and kicking and just sort of reacting to how she was reacting until I screamed cut. And then, you know, I usually tend to let out a big scream or something.
When this dangerous enchantment process is all over... Yennefer comes out on the other side, reborn. She saunters into the Aretuza Ballroom. Walking among kings and powerful mages—Yennefer is the center of attention. She’s transformed, looking like a new woman.
Yennefer (clip): Yennefer of Vengerberg
Tissaia: My apologies, Your Excellence. Please allow me to remove this misguided girl.
King of Aedirn: What sort of a king refuses a dance with one of his subjects. Vengerberg? Are you aware that I’m in the market for just such a mage?
Her plan worked. Yennefer’s going to Aedirn.
It isn’t until now that Yennefer becomes the familiar character that fans know and love from the books. She stands among royalty with perfect posture, wearing her hair down—long, black and curly. She’s the most gorgeous woman in the ballroom—and in the eyes of some, maybe in the entire Continent. Everything we’ve come to know of Yennefer in the series has changed. Which means it’s changed for Anya as well.
Now as a full-fledged mage … an older Yennefer, Anya was no longer wearing a dental piece on her jaw … and there was no hump on her back.
Anya: It made me walk differently. I didn't, I didn't even, I didn't even think consciously about the way she would walk. Obviously I knew that she'd have a straighter spine, but I didn't look at the floor as much. I met people in the eye and that was all to do with the costumes that I was given. And, you know, the makeup that I had on. My hair was down, which makes a big difference. I often have my hair up as Anya. We had corsets and I had corsets, which obviously changed the way I breathed.
To help capture Yennefer’s evolution, hair and make-up designer Csilla was tasked with creating an entirely new look for Anya’s character. Csilla abandoned the medieval designs that drive much of the show’s aesthetic, instead leaning into a much more contemporary look for the new mages in town.
Csilla: We had mages with like bright red lips, basically nowadays makeup, which can be an eye liner, which can be a smoky eye, can be anything.
Yennefer was given a green eyeshadow so her lilac eyes would pop.
Anya: Again, having that make my face completely changed how I felt about myself. But it was still a kind of mask in a way. And it was just...I just felt differently about it. I'd say because I feel most confident without makeup as Anya. So when I had, still had all that makeup on me, yeah, I felt like it was great for the character because she's, she is, she is hiding something. She finds it very difficult for anyone to see her vulnerability.
Despite her grand transformation, Yennifer’s biggest vulnerability remains intact: her desire to be loved.
While her ultimate goal to find true connection is still present, it’s been altered a bit, redirected.
Anya: She does spend the rest of the series questioning why she needed to make that sacrifice, her womb and her power as a woman, which, which is in being able to reproduce just to fit in with society.
Lauren: That was really important to us as writers. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t just presenting this fantasy that “oh if you’re pretty, suddenly the world is going to be very easy for you.” Yennefer has a lot of regrets for what she did to her body.
And right about now, you might be wondering if Yennefer actually made the right choice. Which is exactly what Lauren and the writers wanted...
Lauren: All of these stories. Everything that we hope that the audience goes through with the characters. We hope that it's not really obvious what the character should do next and that there will be debates about whether Yennefer should have gone through her enchantment or not. To me, it's, it's about having to choose between those dichotomies, even when you don't want to. It really is actually something that I think is inherent to the show, which is encapsulating these polar opposites and then trying to figure out a way to navigate life through them and between them.
All-in-all, we really only witness pre-enchantment Yennefer for two episodes. After that, for the rest of the season, we follow the story of a deeply powerful sorceress—one of the reasons why Anya was so excited to take on the role of Yennefer. I mean, c’mon. Who doesn’t want to do magic?
But in The Witcher, magic doesn’t come from the waving of a wand. It’s drawn from deep within. And it comes out of your hands.
Anya: I knew where I wanted Yennefer’s power to come from, which was her core, which was where, like, which was her womb. That is where I wanted to, the source of her power to be. But I knew that that had to be directed through her hands and so that some - I didn't want to overcomplicate that movement. So it took a lot of practicing in a mirror.
Anya wanted to make sure those movements didn’t look silly.
So she spoke with the directors about how she should move her hands … did it capture the intensity they were going for?
Anya: I mean, sometimes I could feel so powerful and it would look absolutely ridiculous. So we had a lot of fun exploring that.
With Yennefer now past her enchantment and having moved beyond Aretuza, her timeline begins to speed up. She ages roughly 60 years over the entirety of the season. Which makes sense in The Witcher. But 23-year-old Anya had to figure out how to play a much older woman, without necessarily looking like or being one.
Anya: All I kept thinking was it's a breath. It's a change of breath, and that's something which I thought about a lot. Like, I couldn't change too much about myself. It wasn't about affecting anything. You know, her breath as a 40-year-old woman would be different at that stage of her life, because of the experience she had up 'til then. She would be calmer about some things and more hot-headed about some things. So that was, that was all I was thinking about.
You can hear that difference when she and Geralt first meet in what can only be described as a bathhouse orgy.
Yennefer (clip): Your heartbeat is extraordinarily slow. You’re…. a mutant.
Geralt: A witcher. Geralt of Rivia.
Yennefer: The famous white wolf. I thought you’d have fangs or horns or something.
Geralt: I had them filed down.
Yennefer: laughs.
Some of the lines in this episode, like
Yennefer (clip): Your heartbeat is extraordinarily slow.
Come straight from Sapkowski’s short story, “The Last Wish.” That short story is the first time we meet Yennefer in the books.
Geralt stumbles into her while trying to save a friend. It’s a wild scene … Yennefer is in a merchant’s house amongst a bunch of naked people … there are clothes strewn all over the room.
For a few pages, Geralt struggles to figure out who this mysterious and powerful woman is.
Here, in Lauren Hissrich’s TV adaptation, a similar scene plays out ... and it’s where Yennefer’s and Geralt’s timelines finally intersect. Yennefer may be a mystery to Geralt, but we, the audience, know her. We’ve seen her grow and change for four episodes. Telling Geralt and Yennefer’s stories non-linearly makes this meeting a much greater pay off.
Lauren: What I love about Geralt and Yennefer and their relationship is they can’t live with each other and they can’t live without each other. And to me, it’s so realistic about so many romantic relationships. Which is the love and hate and the push and pull, especially of two characters who are so strong and so independent and who are, are determined to survive and succeed in the world on their own and who then find their equal and don’t know what to do about it.
This isn’t a meetcute where Geralt and Yennefer end up spending the rest of their days, or even the rest of the season together. But the fact that they aren’t always together, and that Ciri is on her own too, that was important to Lauren.
Lauren: To me, they're a broken family. They are three people who don't want to want anyone, don't want to need anyone and yet are still drawn to each other by destiny, it turns out. And it doesn't go so nicely when they first find each other. You know, they're, they're all, sort of, want to be loners in the world, but it turns out they actually can help each other a lot. And that was the story that I thought was really interesting. So that's - that is at the core of the adaptation I made.
For Geralt, he’s on the search to find acceptance in a world that doesn’t want to accept him.. For Yennefer...
Anya: She's still on that quest to find a deep and meaningful connection.
And for Cirilla, the Lion Cub of Cintra? Well, we’ll have to find out next week on Behind The Scenes of The Witcher.
Lauren: I love origin stories and specifically for Ciri they were very important to me.
Freya: I spent 7 months looking a bit like alien-elven creature going out in the streets. I think people were like, yeah that’s an interesting look.
Lauren: Her scream actually begins a cyclone.
Alex: We had about maybe 8, 9 people from the art department all throwing chairs, helmets, knives, chicken wings, beer bottles, you name it between the camera and the actors
Lauren: Don’t make me explain the Law of Surprise.
Behind The Scenes of The Witcher is a Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios production. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins. Make it your destiny to subscribe, rate and review this podcast. It really does help other people find it. Thanks for listening,