'The Witcher' Showrunner Says Henry Cavill Will Have 'Heroic' Sendoff in Season 3

Henry Cavill may be leaving The Witcher, but at least he will go out with a bang. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Lauren Hissrich said that Cavill will have a "heroic sendoff" from the Netflix original series next year. After that, Hissrich is excited to see Liam Hemsworth take over.

The Witcher is adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher Saga – a series of novels and short stories published in Polish in the 1990s and translated into English over the last two decades. Looking at the story as a whole, Hissrich noted that the end of Season 3 is actually as fitting a time to recast Geralt of Rivia as fans are likely to get. She said: "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."

The Witcher Season 2 premiered in December of 2021 and Season 3 was filmed over the course of this year. In October, Cavill announced that he had decided to leave the series, and Netflix had lined up actor Liam Hemsworth to replace him in the role of Geralt. Cavill's exit has been a source of wild speculation among fans and critics, especially since the actor was such a self-professed fan of the source material.

Cavill is a lifelong video game fan, and in 2020 he said that playing The Witcher video game adaptations inspired him to seek out the role of Geralt in Netflix's adaptation. Cavill is also a fan of Sapkowski's books, and some fans speculated that he left the TV series because it made changes from the books. However, many other book fans have been satisfied with the adaptation and the strategic changes it made, so even if this was a factor it wouldn't explain his big decision away too easily.

At the same time, Cavill was promoting his return to the DC Comics movie adaptations as Superman, so many fans simply assumed he was leaving The Witcher to focus on that. However, Warner Bros. then hired James Gunn to overhaul the DCEU, and in December of 2022 Cavill announced that he would not be returning as Superman after all. Gunn later confirmed that Cavill would not be playing Superman any time soon, but a report by Variety indicated that Cavill might still be on the shortlist for DC casting possibilities.

Naturally, this turnaround made some fans hopeful that Cavill would stick around for The Witcher Season 4, but Netflix says that will not be the case. A representative for the company told CNN that "there are no changes to Season 4 of The Witcher." Cavill will conclude his tenure as Geralt sometime in mid-2023 in Season 3. Season 4 has been greenlit, but there's no word on when it will go into production or when it will air.