The Witcher: Blood Origin Is Going to Take Us Back to the Creation of the Very First Witcher
The Witcher: Blood Origin is finally taking shape as Netflix reveals that it’s cast its first main character: Jodie Turner-Smith from Queen & Slim and Nightflyers will be playing the elf Eile “The Lark” Lithe in the live-action six-episode Netflix series.
Here’s everything we know about the series so far:
The Time and Plot
While we don’t know much about the storyline, we do know when it’s going to take place: around 1,200 years before the events of Geralt and Ciri’s adventures in The Witcher (novels, games, and series). This is basically the start of The Witcher lore as we know it. About 1,200 years ago, an event called “The Conjunction of the Spheres” took place in the multiverse of author Andrzej Sapkowski. Following the convergence, the worlds of elves, monsters, and humans collided and forced all the races—human, elf, monster, dwarves, gnomes, and more—to coexist in The Witcher world after being displaced from their home worlds.
(Apparently, the humans got kicked out because they were destroying their home world. Huh, sounds familiar? And then, in a few hundred years or so, they populated the rest of The Witcher world and massacred its original inhabitants. Ah, trust humans to colonize other worlds as well.)
And this is where The Witcher came to be. With monsters causing death and destruction everywhere they went, Witcher lore says that three human mages came together to create the first witcher to fight these beasts. The writers of the show will most likely have the creative freedom to decide how the plot will carry on from there, because Sapkowski has barely touched on these early years of his universe in any of his books.
What we do know is we’ll get a close look at how potential witchers are brutally trained—and we know it’s hardly a walk in the park. Think of it like Hogwarts for mutant assassins, but only 50 percent of kids survive. Yikes.
The Characters
So far, only Turner-Smith has been cast, and she’ll be playing the role of Eile, alongside a certain Princess Merwyn and a male lead and Eile’s rival, Fjall. We’ve also got a half-crazy assassin, a sorceress with cerebral palsy, and a deaf druid. All of these characters make up the motley crew that will strive to reel in the chaos across the Continent.
We’re still waiting on the rest of the main characters to be cast, but Witcher fans are already calling for Jason Momoa to play a role in The Witcher prequel, something that he appears to be down with, and the rest of us are as well.
Release Date
No word yet on the release date, but it likely won't be out until 2022. The Witcher team at Netflix already has its hands full with season two of the series, which will be out in 2021, and The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf, the animated film about Geralt of Rivia's mentor Vesemir, which won't be out until later this year.
