In October 2022, The Witcher star Henry Cavill announced that he would be stepping down as Geralt of Rivia and that Liam Hemsworth will take over his role.
Cavill, a huge fan of both The Witcher video games and Andrzej Sapkowski's novels, seemed born to play the role of Geralt, the titular monster hunter who goes in a journey across the medieval landscape known as The Continent and gets involved in major events. The Witcher explores Geralt's ties to Anya Chalotra's Yennefer and Freya Allan's Princess Cirilla, both of whom will be key in determining the future of the world.
Now, fans all over the Internet are mad about Cavill's departure from his iconic role, and many of them are asking, "Why did Henry Cavill leave The Witcher?".
Potential Reasons For Henry Cavill Leaving The Witcher
While we still don't know exactly why Cavill is leaving Netflix's The Witcher, we do have some theories.
Did Henry Cavill leave The Witcher because he's returning as Superman?
The announcement of Cavill's exit from the show came on the heels of his confirmed return as Clark Kent/Superman for the DCU with post-credits appearance in Black Adam, setting up a major fight between the titular antihero (played by Dwayne Johnson) and the Man of Steel. According to recent reports, Warner Bros. and DC had started looking for writers for the Man of Steel sequel, nearly a decade after the original movie was first released in theaters.
It seems likely that Cavill's schedule as Superman is once again too full to star in a large-scale of a project as Netflix's The Witcher, especially when paired with his other upcoming movie projects, Matthew Vaughn's Argylle and Guy Ritchie's The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Did Henry Cavill leave The Witcher because of creative differences?
It's widely known that Cavill is a fan of CD Projekt Red's The Witcher video games, and roughly a year after Netflix announced that it was moving forward with a Witcher TV series, Cavill started to actively campaign for the role.
As upsetting as this news has been for fans of the series, it’s not entirely surprising. Cavill has been quietly hinting for years that he hasn’t been happy with the creative director of the Netflix original. “I pursued, pursued, pursued,” Cavill said in a feature with The Hollywood Reporter. He's clearly passionate about Geralt and Andrzej Sapkowski's dark world.
But during the press tour for The Witcher Season 2, the cracks between showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich’s vision for the series and Cavill's genuine love of The Witcher began to show. “Everybody came out of Season 1 laughing and loving Geralt’s fuming. But Henry was saying that when you read the books you spend a lot of time in Geralt’s head. So how can we put that on the page?” Hissrich said.
Though Cavill hasn't openly criticized the writing of the Netflix series, he has previously indicated he pushed for a book-accurate depiction of Geralt in the second season. During an interview with Philstar, he clarified how he wanted to depict a more book-accurate Geralt.
“It’s important for me to have the character be three-dimensional,” Cavill explained. “And it’s tricky to do, as I was saying earlier, because there’s a certain vision and there’s a certain set storyline and plot. And so, it was about me trying to find Geralt’s place within that. All of my asks and requests were along the lines of just being faithful to the source material.”
Regardless of the reason, fans can look forward to watching Cavill as Geralt one last time in The Witcher Season 3, which is set to release sometime in 2023.
Did Henry Cavill leave The Witcher because of a busy production schedule?
According to a recent report from Deadline, Cavill had made a short-term deal for the Netflix original series and "felt it was time to move on after three seasons on the show, which films overseas and has a demanding production."
Fans Launch a Petition Demanding Henry Cavill Return to The Witcher
A Change.org petition started circulating online demanding for Netflix to keep Cavill in The Witcher series and instead replace the writers of the show. At the time of this writing, the petition currently has 187,573 signatures out of its goal of 200,000.
The petition's description reads:
"Henry isn’t leaving The Witcher because of Superman, Netflix executives have once again made a grave decision against delivering for their fans. "The reason why The Witcher is such a popular show is the fans’ love of the source material of books and games, that are hated by and have actively been mocked by the writers and showrunner."
"Let us show them in pure numbers (and thus lost money, because that's all they really care about) that none of us Witcher fans will stand with them and will abandon the show (and potentially our subscriptions) after The Witcher season 3 is concluded. Netflix can only exist because all of us pay them monthly to produce content that is entertaining for us, unfortunately all public information points towards a production team making decisions that are completely opposite to the fans' – our – interests. We already had to suffer through the disaster that was the end of Game of Thrones – NETFLIX don't repeat the exact same mistake of holding onto writers and showrunners that believe themselves to be superior to the actual creator of the stories that made them successful."
The petition also appeared to reference comments made by former The Witcher writer Beau DeMayo, who suggested that some of the writers for the show disliked the material of the source, including CD Projekt Red's The Witcher video games and the original novels written by Andrzej Sapkowski. He said, "I've been on show - namely Witcher - where some of the writers were not or actively disliked the books and games (even actively mocking the source material.)"
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