After a two-year hiatus, the second season of the Netflix hit series The Witcher is finally here and this second batch of episodes has given viewers more time with Henry Cavill’s Geralt alongside other Witchers, especially as they seek to help Freya Allan’s Ciri totally own her powers. And apparently on the set of the series, Cavill and the Witchers really bonded and grew close over their fantastical characters.
When CinemaBlend’s own Laura Hurley had the chance to speak to Paul Bullion, who’s character of Lambert was introduced in Season 2, the actor shared how Henry Cavill regularly got with the other Witcher portrayers to work on building bonds as a complete unit when embodying the monster-slaying squad in the Netflix show. In Bullion’s words:
He's very detailed, and he's very inclusive with the cast around him. I think that goes for everybody. I got on really well with Kim [Bodnia], Yas [Atour], Basil [Eidenbenz], all the other witchers. We had to have that camaraderie. And Henry does lead that from the front. He sat us down, and he'll take a moment in the morning, before we go, to really discuss in depth what this scene might be about, and we'll discuss it and we'll be able to give feedback to him as well. And he had this idea, which really resonated with what I had in mind as well. Like in modern day times, it would be like a military kind of battalion, band of brothers style, where we're family through shared experience, essentially.
As Paul Bullion shared, Henry Cavill was really involved in bringing these new Witchers to life as they are placed as a focus in Season 2. Cavill was a huge fan of The Witcher books and games before becoming the lead in the streaming series, and it sounds like he used that insight to take time with the cast and really build up a fellowship with that particular group. Additionally, Bullion spoke to Cavill’s idea of making the group of witchers not unlike the soldiers in HBO's classic WWII miniseries Band of Brothers.
As The Witcher takes us to Geralt’s home of Kaer Morhen with Ciri, we meet Kim Bodnia’s Vesemir, who is the oldest witcher at the camp and a father figure to Geralt. Alongside the Netflix series delving into that relationship, we also meet other witchers such as Paul Bullion’s Lambert, Yasen Atour’s Coën, Basil Eidenbenz’s Eskel and more. With so many new faces, it would be easy for things to come across as disjointed, but as Bullion explained, going into it with the military corps mindset was a big help in the bond feeling authentic both on screen and off. As Bullion said:
We've all been through this really hard training together. So only the witchers in the School of the Wolf can understand exactly what we've been through, and we've lost family along the way. So we've been through this trauma together, and that bonds us. We're like Royal Marines, or as the term was brought up, like Navy SEALs, and we have to behave that way. And I think that's a great description of what witchers are like in terms of their bond with each other.
The actor’s insight on how the witchers’ worked behind the scenes is definitely interesting, and thinking of them as a ‘band of brothers’ does better inform us about the dynamic the Netflix series was going with for the other witchers. Let's not start comparing the show's monsters to real-world military enemies, though, or things will get too serious.
Viewers are definitely serious about loving The Witcher, though. Following suit after the hype of the first season, The Witcher’s eight-episode second season has remained in the list of most-watched titles on Netflix since it dropped on December 17th. We won’t spoil the cliffhanger here, but you can check out our season 2 ending explainer, but as you can guess, the end of The Witcher is not near.
There’s already been a greenlight for Season 3, which is already underway in the writer’s room and is set to be based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s second Witcher novel, The Time of Contempt. There’s an expansive future planned for The Witcher and it’s great to see the show bring in more witchers alongside Geralt already in Season 2. While waiting on updates, be sure to keep up with our 2022 TV premiere schedule to see what shows are coming in the new year!
