Netflix’s The Witcher Comic-Con Panel Recap

The Witcher panel plays footage.

We see Yennefer, Ciri alone, and we see Geralt getting a bath interspersed with other Geralt footage. “No one is ever what they seem.” Geralt using signs and fighting in a courtyard. The logo plays.

Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, Freya Allan, Anya Chalotra, Henry Cavill, all come out for the panel.

“I’m a big gamer. I played the games a lot, many many hours, and Warcraft. But there was something about Geralt that struck a chord with me. he’s not your average hero. He’s a very real type person who won’t treat everyone perfectly, but he’s also really a hero.”

A Witcher is short is a young boy who’s been taken from the streets or left to fend for themselves and ultimately taken

Most of these children don’t survival 1 of 10. The travel the world hunting monsters for coin, and that’s their one sole purpose but they are often rejected by the world because they are not supposed to have emotions, but ultimately a bunch of badasses that kill monsters.”

They had looked at 207 people for Geralt, but Lauren always kept his voice in her head. Cavill admits he was also annoying and called all the time because he really wanted the part.

Clip plays.

Geralt kills someone with an ax in a throne room and then goes to dismantling the guards in the room with stylish slashes of his sword. A full brawl breaks out with Geralt working side by side with a bevy of soldiers and alliances are tested. He comes to swords with Queen Calanthe. She yells stop and things zoom in on Geralt and the clip ends.

“Her overall goal is to find true connection and unconditional love,” Chalotra said. When asked what she had to let go to find her power, she says “she had to let go of, she presents such a hard exterior and that’s something she has to reflect upon and tap into the vulnerability, which makes her the most powerful witch out there.”

Yennefer clip.

Which one of us are you here for (talks to Raven circling above). She talks to a baby on the beach. “Sorry you didn’t have a life, but you weren’t missing much”. “Still, what would you have had? Parents?”

“This is the first time I’ve seen that clip without the VFX tag that read “Make baby dead”,” Hissrich said.

“I’ve always wanted to be in a fantasy epic,” Allan said.

Ciri is described as a very protected princess.

“As you’ve said she’s had a very sheltered upbringing and very privileged. She’s always been surrounded by people that have been in that environment, and I think that’s a huge part of her journey this season, being put in other people’s shoes. She has to find a new kind of strength to look past the horrific things she sees, so it’s a journey of reflection and discovery.”

“I don’t know that I would call it a woman’s perspective. In the books, you meet all of the characters through Geralt’s lens, and I wanted to see who they were before they met Geralt, and would have all their own journeys and not just seen through Geralt’s lens. You get to see so many things in flashbacks, but we got to bring those to life, and I think that’s my favorite part of the series. I would call it an addition to the books. We were able to give them a bit more breathing room so you can get to know them before they meet up.

These characters are fully formed.

Another Ciri clip plays.

Roach, geez, Geralt isn’t Geralt without Roach. We meet roach with Geralt at the beginning of this story, and as most of you know Roach is much more than a horse, and much more than a flying horse for some of you as well, but he’s like an anchor to Geralt’s tried and true self, because he gives that name to every horse he has, and because Geralt is 100 years old, and horses don’t live that long. He’s gone through a few Roach’s already. She’s the one access point he has to humanity.

It’s the one horse he feels he can be himself in front of.

“It’s not that Witcher’s aren’t supposed to make moral decisions, it’s the myth that they don’t have emotions, but that’s what aids them in asking for coin for a monster, and if they don’t have emotions then they can negotiate as hard as they want and someone can’t use my kids line. Geralt is much more than that. He has thing hard exterior because he believes that’s the way that world is, but in truth deep deep down there’s this man that has a belief in what the world can be.

A trailer plays, and we see our first monster and Geralt’s eyes are darkened, indicating he took one of his elixirs or potions.