After a very long wait, The Witcher Season 2 is nearly here, and we’ll soon be able to watch Geralt as he travels with Ciri to his childhood Witcher-training home of Kaer Morhen so that he can protect her and help her learn to fight for herself. While we know this new duty of Geralt’s will lead to our hero being introduced to a lot of additional characters, as well as now seeing a chattier monster hunter than before, we still don’t know exactly what will this mean for the, basically still brand new, surrogate father / daughter relationship between Ciri and her grunting protector. Well, star Henry Cavill has just opened up about how his character will try to relate to the on-the-run princess.
After spending most of The Witcher’s first season trying to find each other when her city, Cintra, fell to the Nilfgaardians, Ciri and Geralt finally came upon one another by accident (fine...destiny) in the Season 1 finale. Now, they’re tasked with getting to know each other as they also learn how to work together, while Geralt and his team of Witchering friends train her up real good. When asked during IGN’s live Q&A for the show how the relationship between Geralt and Ciri will change in Season 2, Henry Cavill said:
I started to layer in this more intellectual, wiser Geralt. I wanted him to recognize her trauma, because it’s very easy to forget - you see a character like Ciri and you think, ‘She’s been through trauma,’ and it’s really terrible - but we also forget that Geralt’s been through trauma. He was younger than her and being filled with magical chemicals and herbs, and screaming until he almost died, and kids are dying around him. And then, the people who did this to him are like, ‘We’re your friends!’ And they’re like, ‘By the way, you survived surprisingly well, so we’re going to do more to you.’ Then he went out into the world, and the world hated him…From someone who’s gone through that, he’s going to have that sense of patience with her, and that sense of waiting. She’s been through a lot; she’s going to lash out from time to time. Instead of him lashing out in return, he’s going to sit back and try to understand.
I have to say, Cavill is totally correct in his theory that many viewers would likely forget about how Geralt became the badass, sword-fighting Witcher he was by the time we first met him. We only got a tiny glimpse of what he went through when his mom left him for Vesemir. But, during his hallucinations in the finale, we hear him talk about how difficult and dangerous becoming a Witcher was, and get a sense of how angry being left made him.
As Cavill noted, it’s exactly all of this emotional pain and physical trauma that Geralt will tap into to attempt to build a bond with Ciri. He may have been Witchin’ for many decades by now, but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten anything about how it felt to be a scared, confused kid who probably just wanted life to go back to the way it was before being taken to Kaer Morhen.
Even though Ciri managed to survive (with some help) during her long journey to locate Geralt after her kingdom was taken over, all of her recent struggles will be completely fresh in her mind. From what Cavill said, this will make her less than cooperative at times right after they meet, and probably especially once they begin training, so Geralt is going to have to pepper those I-was-a-traumatized-child-too stories in with a healthy heaping of parental patience for young Cirilla to fully embrace her new, weird life. Luckily, it sounds like he’s up to the challenge.
Henry Cavill and The Witcher return to Netflix for Season 2 on December 17, so make sure you check out the five things you need to remember and understand the timeline shenanigans of Season 1 before watching. For more (lighter) fare to enjoy this month, be sure to check out our Christmas movies and TV schedule!
