In a recent interview with The Wrap, Lauren Hissrich, the showrunner on Netflix’s hit series The Witcher, confirmed that season 2 will introduce the character of Vesemir, a fellow Witcher who’s set to be played by Kim Bodnia.
For those of you who’ve only seen the show, the best part about this bit of news is the prospect of getting to see Geralt (played by Henry Cavill) interact with a fellow monster hunter. However, for those of you who played the fantasy games developed by CD Projekt Red on which the show is based, this is huge, because Vesemir was a major supporting character in the latest title of that series, The Wild Hunt.
In addition to Vesimir, Hissrich told The Wrap that the second season will also introduce other familiar faces from the games, including Lambert (played by Paul Bullion) and Coen (Yasen Atour).
“Probably my favorite additions for Season 2 are the new Witchers,” Hissrich said. “Really, in Season 1, we got to know Geralt and he’s our prime example of a witcher. And then there is one other Witcher, Remus, who we meet in Episode 103, who quickly dies (laughs). So it was, for us really, about getting Geralt back to his roots and sort of learning where he came from and what his story is and what his sense of family is.”
“When I talk about ‘The Witcher,’ I always talk about how these three characters coming together — Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer — they come together as a family. It’s the most important part of the series for me,” she added. “And when you start to imagine someone’s family, you also need to understand their family of origin. Sometimes that’s a mother and father, sometimes that’s blood relatives. For Geralt, it’s his brothers, it’s the brotherhood of the witchers.
So I’m really excited to get back in and meet Vesemir, his father figure, for the first time and all of these men that he was raised with since he was seven years old. And one of the benefits of quarantine is the public has gotten to know these actors a little bit, because they are very present on social media and we’ve been doing bakeoffs and we’ve been doing danceoffs. And I think everyone has really gotten to know these actors a little bit better, too. And it’s exciting, because I think that sort of energy will be coming into Season 2.”
Even to gamers, Geralt is the epitome of what a Witcher is supposed to be: grim, grumpy, cold, calculating and emotionally distant. However, as the new episodes of The Witcher are bound to show us, those are more the trademarks of his character and less those of his profession.
If Vesemir is at all similar to how he was portrayed in the games, he’s a lot more friendly and jovial than Geralt. In The Wild Hunt, the two characters often played good-cop, bad-cop whenever they were out hunting together. Their different personalities certainly produced an interesting dynamic, one that would provide a welcome addition to Netflix’s much stiffer iteration of the source material.
