We Should Be Open to Liam Hemsworth’s Geralt in ‘The Witcher’ Season 4

The Big Picture

• Chris Hemsworth replacing Henry Cavill as Geralt in
  The Witcher
  brings strong emotions, criticism, and comparisons between the two actors’ abilities.
• There is a degree of flexibility in the fantasy genre to explain actor changes, which
  The Witcher
  may take advantage of in Season 4.
• Despite initial backlash and speculation, Hemsworth has the acting chops to deliver a performance worthy of praise as Geralt.

Over a year and a half ago, Netflix announced that The Witcher would be returning for a fourth season, but there was a catch involved with its renewal that had a lot of fans feeling like Maxwell Lord was playing with the Dreamstone again. After playing the titular, gruff-spoken Witcher for three seasons, Henry Cavill was departing and passing his sword and medallion to Liam Hemsworth. Needless to say, there were a lot of strong emotions then, and those emotions returned tenfold this week when Netflix delivered a video of Hemsworth, AnyaChalotra, and JoeyBatey at the first table read for Season 4. Hemsworth may still seem like an unexpected pick for Geralt, but so was Cavill when his casting was announced back in 2018. And if the last few years have taught us anything, there is a lot of power packed into a white-blonde lace front wig — even when they’re animated.

Hemsworth has a few things stacked against him: he is the younger (and much hotter) brother of Chris Hemsworth. He is widely known for his tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship with Miley Cyrus. And his fans get pinned as only liking him for his work as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games. The latter, of course, completely disregards that some of his best work is actually in The Dressmaker, Most Dangerous Game, and yes, The Last Song. While Cavill may have had Superman on his resume when he saddled up Roach, the two actors have had a fairly similar trajectory as hot himbos and shoot-’em-up baddies. At the end of the day, that’s kind of the exact right fit for someone like Geralt. You want someone buff enough to rip the heads off monsters and hot enough to make Yennefer swoon and roll her eyes at whatever comes out of his mouth. And if the table-reading video is any indication, Hemsworth and Chalotra already have more chemistry than she ever had with Cavill.

‘The Witcher’ Is No Stranger to Complaints

By design, Geralt is a difficult character to embody in live-action. When you have a fanbase who has spent hundreds of hours playing as Geralt, there’s going to be a certain degree of ownership, whereas other franchises might not encounter that same sort of fan reaction to deviations in the story. No matter who they cast as Geralt back in 2018 or who they announced would replace that actor, fans were never going to be happy.

The Witcher has been plagued with critiques since it first premiered on Netflix, with most fans relentlessly comparing it to the video games, which are arguably pretty fantastic pieces of storytelling. The video games are based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s best-selling book series, and the Netflix series is a loose adaptation of both pieces of source material. Cavill’s Geralt has been no stranger to complaints either, with the actor even having to explain the accent he chose to use for the monster hunter because fans took issue with it. Season 2 brought The Witcher even more criticism when the show killed off a fan-favorite character who definitely doesn’t die like that in the books. The argument, of course, was that the show was taking a different route and that required higher stakes and new motivators to propel Geralt forward.

There is no world in which Hemsworth’s introduction as Geralt won’t be met with criticism if even Cavill wasn’t immune to gripes from fans who claimed his casting was “wrong” and critics who snarked that he might as well have been wearing a helmet like The Mandalorian because he lacked charm. Despite reviews saying otherwise, Cavill is definitely not lacking in the charm department, and neither is Hemsworth.

Henry Cavill’s Departure Was Linked to Playing Superman

Cavill took on the role of Geralt during a period when his future as Superman was largely unknown and the future of the DCEU as a whole seemed pretty uncertain. He had just wrapped on Justice League and there had been no news about a sequel to Man of Steel, which was five years behind him at the time. The actor was still doing promos for The Witcher Season 3 in September 2022, during Netflix’s annual TUDUM event, but it was reportedly around this same time that Dwayne Johnson won his multi-year fight to get Cavill back into his super-suit and a super-secret post-credit scene was filmed for Black Adam. Not that it secured a permanent return for Cavill, who faced a rather embarrassing and public misunderstanding about his “return” to the universe.

But before that misunderstanding came to light, Cavill started sharing his excitement about returning to the newly minted DC Universe under its newly appointed co-heads, and the countdown began to see which of his other commitments he would have to shed to make time for Clark Kent. Projects like the newly-released The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and the now-in-production Highlander remake would have been easy enough to work around his film schedule, but filming a television series like The Witcher would have been a lot harder to work around. So why was the internet trying to convince itself that Cavill’s departure was the result of some secret war being waged against The Witcher’s showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich? Well, the internet is rarely kind to female showrunners, much less those taking on the task of adapting video games or high fantasy.

Fan Reactions to ‘The Witcher’ Recasting Seemed Pointed

In the minutes following Cavill and Hemsworth’s Instagram announcements, tweets started circulating on Twitter misrepresenting segments from year-old interviews and articles to make it seem like Cavill and Hissrich were in some sort of battle of wills against each other. One article made it seem like the two clashed over Cavill wanting Geralt to have more dialogue in Season 2 when, in reality, the full interview in THR makes it clear that Hissirch took Cavill’s notes to heart and found a way for them to coalesce with her plans to focus on Geralt’s father-like relationship with Ciri (Freya Allan). Another tweet contained screenshots of quotes from an interview Cavill did with The Philippine Star ahead of Season 2, where he spoke about being a massive fan of the franchise as a whole and how he had to approach the series as a fan and also an actor being paid to play a role. After all, this is the same man who spent the lockdown playing the games on the hardest setting. No part of the quotes within the context of the conversation was negative or overly harsh towards the series, but they were easy quotes to misrepresent with screenshots because he was talking about his desire to see more of the books brought into the series to help flesh Geralt out more.

A lot of this speculation started after Beau DeMayo, a former writer and producer on the series, claimed on Instagram that individuals in the writer’s room on the show weren’t fans of the source material. His comments came in tandem with glib remarks about how he planned to staff his X-Men ‘97 series with writers who “had to be fans” of the original series. DeMayo was subsequently fired by Marvel mere days before X-Men ‘97 premiered to critical acclaim. While there’s no question that writers should be well-versed in the stories they are adapting, there is always room for improvement on the source material and new stories shouldn’t seek to repeat the exact same storylines over and over again. Disney+’s Moon Knight was met with significant pushback from fans who were disappointed that the Oscar Isaac-led series changed so much of Marc Spector’s backstory. (DeMayo wrote for that series as well.) Recently, Leslye Hedland made an excellent point about why she chose to have a non-fan in her writer’s room in The Acolyte, to ensure they weren’t getting too far into the weeds because everyone else had an emotional attachment to the franchise.

In hindsight, it seemed like fans of The Witcher were looking for a larger conspiracy to explain Cavill’s departure from the series when the truth was plain enough to see. It was more fun to pin the blame on Hissrich and some psychological war between Cavill and the writers when the reality was that Cavill was looking to make Superman his top priority — even if it didn’t end up panning out for him. Now, he has Chad Stalheski’s Highlander keeping him busy, which will give Cavill an even bigger opportunity to practice the blade.

What Does Hemsworth’s Casting Mean for ‘The Witcher’?

The Witcher has become a flagship fantasy franchise for Netflix, with spin-off series like The Witcher: Blood Origin and the anime film Nightmare of the Wolf, and a potential follow-up arriving sometime in the future. Hissrich revealed in 2019 that she had a seven-season plan for the series, which has now been parred down to a more definitive five-season plan, with confirmation that the series was renewed for its fifth and final season arriving alongside the video of Liam Hemsworth at the Episode 1 table read.

With Cavill’s departure being announced before Season 3 was even streaming on Netflix, The Witcher didn’t have an opportunity to really set up the recasting within the realms of the narrative, which means Season 4 will have to do some heavy lifting to explain the sudden change. Or, maybe not. Replacing actors can be a jarring scenario for any series, but the fantasy genre has a certain degree of flexibility that other projects do not. Geralt faces off against a number of different monsters, witches and sorceresses, and other magical creatures that could easily lead to some sort of face-changing situation. The Witcher has already bent the rules with how their cast of characters has aged, namely with Jaskier (Batey) not really aging at all after a pretty significant time jump, so arguments about Cavill and Hemsworth’s six-year age difference are moot. If they want to or need to make Hemsworth look like he’s in his late thirties instead of early thirties, I’m sure The Witcher’s award-winning make-up artists will be able to handle that.

It’s easy to look at Hemsworth and see an Australian pretty-boy who lives in the shadow of his Thor-playing brother, but he has the acting chops to take on Geralt and deliver as praise-worthy of a performance as his predecessor. Cavill seems at peace with Hemsworth replacing him, and since fans seem to think Cavill is the gatekeeper of all things Geralt, we should take his confidence in Hemsworth at face value.

The Witcher is available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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