The Witcher: Casting Upcoming Characters

Lauren Hissrich, the showrunner of Netflix’s The Witcher, has seven seasons planned out for the show, apparently. That means that audiences will likely see most, if not all, of Sapkowski’s Witcher characters in the show at one point or another, depending on how original the series decides to be.

That’s a lot of characters. Sapkowski’s Witcher stories span decades and explore a multitude of settings – from the Continent to Skellige to mystical worlds only accessible by those with sufficient magical abilities – and there are always more people to be met in each of these locales.

This is a fact and surprisingly not something ripped straight from CD Projekt Red’s key features list for the Witcher 3, meaning that the characters already announced to be appearing in season two will by no means be the last ones to be introduced. These characters will of course need casting.

Season 1 ditched the idea that The Witcher primarily features only characters of a white, eastern-European ethnicity, so the following choices will also not be following this assumption. All would be superb in the following roles given the chance, starting with...

Rience is an angry young mage with a sadistic streak that works to find Ciri and is also generally a pain in the neck for Geralt, Yennefer and co. If it were not for the name and the fact that he is a mage, those yet to read the books would assume this character to be Cahir, given just how ruthless the Netflix version is.

Because of these newfound similarities, it is possible that Hissrich has swapped the two’s character arcs, making Rience the sympathetic figure.

As such, someone who can straddle that line of initially seeming like a complete villain but later appear far more human is needed, someone like Joe Cole. Cole did a wonderful job of depicting a similar arc in Gangs of London, where his a character, a newly promoted mob boss, was usually angry and cruel, but only cruel to a point.

That is what this Rience needs, though if Hissrich aims to put a more book-accurate interpretation to the screen, then Cole would simply be able to cross the line into full villainy. He would do a great job either way, basically.