Over the past two years, The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich had the unenviable job of cobbling together a second season of the Netflix fantasy series during a period that saw the rest of the world – and most of the TV industry – still on lockdown.
The show was one of the first to start filming again and, in many ways, it would serve as the example of what to do (and what to avoid) for other big-budget productions. On top of that, Hissrich was tasked with delivering a more expansive follow-up to a story about monster-hunters and Elven rebellions and rogue mages, one that satisfied longtime book fans and felt digestible enough for newcomers to latch onto.
The good news for audiences tuning into the show’s second season this month is that both the series and its showrunner have found a groove. The Witcher returns with darker storylines and even more world-building, but it’s the characters (not the monsters) that take priority this time. Of course, the idea of what makes a monster and who can become one is a question Hissrich wanted to ask this season. She also wanted to show a more intimate side to Henry Cavill’s gruff, unnaturally detached slayer, transforming Geralt of Rivia from “daddy” to dad. (Sorry, we had to.)
We chatted with Hissrich about the impossible journey to getting season two made, softening up her male lead, and the day on set when she almost broke Superman.
Filming season two during a pandemic had to be even more challenging as a showrunner. Did you learn anything about yourself, your cast, or just the job in general?
It was really interesting because we had to start to account for everyone’s mental and emotional health in the pandemic as well. We had, at that point, sort of been taught that other humans were dangerous. I mean, I remember in those early days of lockdown, putting on a mask and going for a walk, and even in your neighborhood, you would see someone, and you would go to the opposite side of the street. So to start working again and to make sure that people not only were excited to come back but felt safe, what I think it really did is it brought mental health to the forefront of our conversations. I sat down with the cast ahead of time. We did a big Zoom. We had an epidemiologist who sort of walked through what our testing regime was going to be, how we were going to change making the show, and then he logged off, and I got the opportunity to talk to all the cast about how they might be feeling, the fears and trepidations of coming back, the fears of leaving their families, getting back on planes, whatever it meant for them.
I offered to talk to anyone. I’m not a therapist, but I’m here. And so many people called me, just wanting to talk. “I’m scared about leaving my girlfriend. We’re not going to be able to travel back and forth so I’m not going to see her for six months. That’s going to be really hard.” So many things like that. And I’ve learned that so much of my job is about working with people and being a leader of people. There’s writing, there’s producing, all those things, but if you don’t have a cast and a crew that feels safe and that feel like they can come talk to you, then you don’t have much of anything.
There’s also the need to be able to adapt the story you’re telling, figure out what’s working and what’s not. Were there big changes you wanted to make this time around?
So the silver lining of those five months off was real-time to reflect on all the scripts, specifically to look at our character stories, which were the biggest thing that I think had to shift from season one. I feel like a lot of the feedback that I read after season one was that we spent so much time setting up the chessboard, that there wasn’t enough time to actually sit back and play and have fun. Not that “fun” is a word that I would use necessarily describe all of season two, but the fun part of getting to know these characters better, the fun part of delving in and understanding what’s making Geralt tick.
Obviously, we took a huge chance in season one and made Yennefer a much larger character than she was in the initial books. That worked really well. Audiences loved that character. So we knew going into season two, that that’s something we wanted to replicate, which caused us some difficulties because her role is not big in this book either. So we had to come up with another story for her out of whole cloth and make sure that tonally, it felt like it fit within the spirit of The Witcher world, but also put her in an interesting place when she did get called upon to come to train Ciri. What has she been doing? And how does that impact her when she shows up? Because she’s got to have wants of her own. Those scenes aren’t very interesting if she’s just going to fulfill someone else’s needs.
When you went back through the scripts, were there any fundamental changes you ended up making?
The stories were pretty set out, but we did make some shifts specifically in the tones of characters. One of the things Henry Cavill and I talked about a lot was not only Geralt’s character, but Geralt’s relationship with Vesemir. Vesemir’s characterization in the books is quite curmudgeonly and you understand where Geralt gets it from, but we also knew that as part of our storytelling, we needed Vesemir to be very appealing to Ciri. We needed her to want to know him better, so we talked a lot about how to make him a slightly more empathetic character, how to have that grandfatherly kindness underneath, but also how to make sure that he still keeps the distance that he has in the books because he’s scared of being hurt again.
Speaking of softening up characters, it certainly feels like Geralt has more emotional depth this season.
Henry felt very passionate that, in season two, he wanted Geralt to speak more, to actually be more verbose. Of course, in the books, Geralt has a lot more internal dialogue. So we had struggled for a while with how to adapt that to the screen. What we had was a story of him becoming a father and realizing that was the perfect opportunity for us to tell the story that we wanted to tell and for Henry to get a little bit more of what he wanted in Geralt. He pushed hard for that softness. He will say that Geralt has more soul in season two and I could not agree more.
The big headline during shooting season two was Henry’s injury and what it might mean for his future as an action star – and on this show. Can you walk me through what happened?
We were shooting a training sequence where we were seeing Ciri do something and then we were seeing Geralt do the same thing. We had filmed Freya’s [Allan] part of her sort of dashing through the woods. He was on the same exact route and he … I will never forget. He kind of stopped and said that he had heard a pop, but of course, all of us were like, “Oh, he’d tripped on something. Or he’d just twisted something the wrong way.” But when I went to visit him in his trailer and he expressed just how much pain he was in. And then a doctor came in and explained to us just how bad it was …
What I will say is we worked hard to shift nothing except for the schedule. It was really important to Henry that we didn’t start to shape our storytelling around that injury because Geralt else is a monster hunter and a fighter. One of the things that Henry takes great pride in is doing all the stunt sequences himself. What we did basically was took our schedule and put it in a blender. We shot everything that we could shoot that didn’t involve Henry, and when we did start to bring him back in, we started with scenes where he was sitting, where he didn’t have to move at all. Then we would start with scenes where he was just standing, then maybe ones where he was walking into a room or out of a room. And by the end of the season, which was a solid five months after his injury, he was able to return to all of these stunt sequences and do them exactly as planned.
I’m going to bring this up only because I know fans will probably also notice … there’s an abysmal lack of bath scenes this season. Why is that?
[Laughs] Why?! Why she says.
This is purely out of concern for the story since I know how important personal hygiene is to Witchers.
It’s true. And I do think that The Witcher benefits from baths, so I will rectify that in the future. My stance on sexiness, not just nudity but in general, sort of the sexuality of our show, is to only use it when it benefits the story. This is not something that I think is done in all television. Certainly not all fantasy shows where it kind of becomes a thing that’s there to shock audiences. I just don’t think our audience needs to be shocked by people having sex all the time or women or men being naked all the time.
This season is about familial relationships. It’s about people exploring new sides of themselves in terms of being a mother or father. There’s not a lot about romance this season because it just didn’t fit into our story. But I happen to know where things are going. I think that people be pleased by some romance in the future. But yeah, this season was a bath-free zone.
‘The Witcher’ returns to Netflix on December 17.
