Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Preview, streaming, TV | Tagged: bbc, david tennant, doctor who, henry cavill, netflix, the witcher

The Witcher: Driver Applies Doctor Who Logic to Henry Cavill Recasting

Over the past two months, it's been pretty safe to say that most of the talk around "The Witcher" universe has been centered around Henry Cavill's departure from the Netflix series after the upcoming third season, with Liam Hemsworth (Poker Face) taking over as Geralt moving forward. One person who has a very "pop culture" way of looking at the situation is Minnie Driver (Grosse Pointe Blank), who has joined the streaming universe as shapeshifting, world & time-traveling storyteller Seanchaí on prequel series The Witcher: Blood Origin (and will play a role in the franchise moving forward). Speaking with EW, Driver shared how Doctor Who helped her offer some perspective to her son, who asked her about the casting move.

"We come from this tradition of 'Doctor Who' where the Doctor regenerates. I think we need to look at it far more like it's amazing," Driver explained. "It's an amazing person, it's an amazing character, and we should have different people playing it. So that was a really cool conversation with a teenager. He was like, 'I never thought about it like that.'" A bonus for Driver? Being able to remind her son that she still has her finger on pop culture's pulse. "I was like, 'Good; you should talk to me more often. I'm cool.'"

Series creator & showrunner Lauren Hissrich explained to EW that even though the upcoming season wasn't written with Cavill's departure in mind, the actor will see a "heroic sendoff" during his final run. In addition, Hissrich drops a tease about how this season impacts Geralt in such a way that it sets up a "new mission" for him in the fourth season. "Henry [Cavill] has given so much to the show, and so we want to honor that appropriately," Hissrich explained. "What is so interesting is that season 3, to me, is the closest thing that we've done as a one-to-one adaptation of the books," she added, referring to the season's partial adaptation of Time of Contempt. "Obviously, we can't do every page, but 'Time of Contempt' gave us so many big action events, plot points, defining character moments, huge reveals of a big bad. There's so much to do that we were able to stick really, really closely with the books."

And that means a number of opportunities for Cavill's Geralt to further grow as a character while setting up what's to come in the Hemsworth-starring fourth season. "Geralt's big turn is about giving up neutrality and doing anything that he has to do to get to Ciri. And to me, it's the most heroic sendoff that we could have, even though it wasn't written to be that. Geralt has a new mission in mind when we come back to him in season 4. He's a slightly different Geralt than we expected. Now, by the way, that's an understatement," Hissrich added.

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