Whose Geralt of Rivia Is This?

October 7, 2025
9:52 pm

On October 30, the day Liam Hemsworth dons the white-blond wig and yellow contact lenses that make him Geralt of Rivia on Netflix’s The Witcher, it will have been three years and one day since once-Geralt Henry Cavill stepped down from the role. “As with the greatest of literary characters, I pass the torch with reverence for the time spent embodying Geralt and enthusiasm to see Liam’s take on this most fascinating and nuanced of men,” Cavill wrote at the time.

When evaluating the first full preview with our eyes, we found Hemsworth more or less fits the part: He’s got the hulking stature and requisite scowl for Andrzej Sapkowski’s beloved fictional bounty killer. In the midst of a trailer that promises the return of all our friends — Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), Ciri (Freya Allan), and Jaskier (Joey Batey) — we see Hemsworth’s Geralt rally a group of armed friends with a bellowing, bafflingly American-sounding, “Let’s fucking go!” Let’s fucking go? Is this something Geralt of Rivia would say? Is it something he’d say like that? It’s not as if they don’t cuss in The Witcher (in fact, they cuss a lot), but they don’t cuss like this. In the absence of Cavill’s brooding interpretation of Geralt, Hemsworth’s first season on the show looks way closer to Den of Thieves than to a Polish fantasy world.

As many a YouTube comment on the trailer says, whatever’s happening with Hemsworth in this role isn’t his fault — and until the full season is out, we won’t really know how well it does (or doesn’t) work. Recasting Geralt is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Witcher-related drama over the past several years, starting with the alleged dissolution of the relationship between Cavill and showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich. Sapkowski’s world is bawdy, violent, and grotesque. The Witcher books and the Witcher video games barter in cruelty and despair, and though Geralt has great affection for his allies, everyone else he can take or leave. The Witcher television series softened the edges of the character significantly — this is a guy we have to grow to love; he’s not Walter White — leaving Cavill and others who love the original books feeling the show had become something else.

The Witcher isn’t Netflix’s only show to fumble the IP over the past several months. After the rush of popularity of the show’s first season, the streamer bet on both an animated prequel called Nightmare of the Wolf and a live-action film called Blood Origin, neither of which made much of an impact. (Not unlike the franchise, the fourth iteration of the video game also hangs in limbo.) The drama series, meanwhile, was supposed to go for seven seasons but Hemsworth and company will tap out after five. That this cinematic universe fizzled out like a spell gone awry is a shame because Sapkowski’s world-building is thrilling and original — funnier and more creature driven than the dour family dealings on the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon. All is not well in the marshes of Velen.

Despite the mess, Hemsworth does more or less look as though he can carry the weight of the show on his beefy shoulders. Season four of The Witcher promises war and violence with Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri all fighting their way back to one another. When Hemsworth yells “Let’s fucking go,” his energy feels right even if everything else about the line delivery feels wrong. If nothing else, one other new face in the Witcher trailer feels promising, and that’s Laurence Fishburne’s Regis: a high-ranking vampire who is also a barber-surgeon, this world’s version of being a model-actress. Fishburne has all the right energy for the show — just serious enough with a side of silly — that could just breathe some new life into the old skeleton of a once-beloved series. Even if The Witcher stumbles over the finish line, there may be one character worth spinning off.