With the final season of Game of Thrones now long behind us, that sizeable gap in the schedule for an adult fantasy show is being filled by Netflix’s The Witcher. Hitting the streaming service back in December, it adapts Andrzej Sapkowski’s classic fantasy novels and is not only the highest-rated series on the platform, but a second season is already in production and we’re hearing that a third outing has been greenlit as well.
Suffice it to say, it’s been a massive success, but the comparisons with Game of Thrones have still been unavoidable and it’s not hard to see why. After all, The Witcher has its fair share of not only fantasy elements, but also a lot of sex and nudity, with Anya Chalotra’s Yennefer being at the center of most of it. But how much of it did the actress do herself?
Well, it turns out, it was actually Chalotra in most of the scenes, with only one particular sequence requiring the use of a body double. Speaking with Metro, the star said that she wanted to do the nudity herself, but needed her double for the very first sex scene.
“I had a body double for the sex scenes, and she was always there. Flora. ‘But I didn’t [use her], I only used her for the first sex scene because I realised very quickly in that first sex scene that actually, I didn’t feel comfortable [with] anyone else portraying Yennefer, because it’s still acting isn’t it?”
She went on to explain that she found it hard to watch that first scene and afterwards, decided to do the rest on her own:
“I found [watching] that really hard, so if we were going to talk about the sex scenes then it would be how we were best going to film them, so that I was comfortable and you’d get you’d still get what we needed for the story to move on,’ she explained. ‘But with the audience, yeah, but the wide shot isn’t me. The intimacy between Yennefer and Istrid is. Those close up shots.”
“We thought we could portray those scenes without any nudity,” Anya said. “Semi-nude, but not like the first sex scene where I had to use my body double. The only things that I had to get nude for were the scenes, the transformation scene and other scenes which actually really did develop the story and really need to, you know…”
At only 23 years of age, and being a relative newcomer in the industry, it’s certainly a bit surprising that she decided to take on most of the nude scenes by herself and not use a body double, as many young actresses may’ve done.
But even putting that aside for a moment, no one can deny that Chalotra gave an absolutely tremendous performance as Yennefer and we imagine that all the major Hollywood studios will now be knocking on her door. And frankly, we can’t wait to see more of her in both The Witcher and any other future projects that she ends up starring in.
