On December 17th, The Witcher will return to Netflix for a second season that’s been two years in the making. If it wasn’t the pandemic causing trouble for the production, it was the leg injury suffered by leading man Henry Cavill as the cast and crew battled against all sorts of mitigating factors to get Geralt of Rivia’s second set of adventures in the can.
Shooting had only just started in March 2020 when things were shut down for two weeks as the Coronavirus pandemic began to sweep across the world, with star Kristofer Hivju testing positive. In May, every major film and television project filming in Europe and the United Kingdom was ground to a halt, and it wasn’t until August that cameras started rolling again.
The Witcher was then shut down again in November and didn’t wrap until April of this year, while in the meantime Cavill was hurt while tackling an assault course, forcing the creative team to rework the schedule to accommodate his recovery. In a new interview, the DCEU’s Superman details how he coped with suffering such a heavy dose of misfortune and a highly inopportune moment.
“I think one of the skills I’ve picked up over the years is just forging ahead regardless of difficulty or hard work or trials and tribulations. So when the hamstring injury came, I tried to look at the silver lining. It was like, ‘Okay. I was working insane hours and it was exhausting and I now physically can’t work because I’m on crutches’. So I was focusing more on taking the time off and going, how can I best heal myself? When it comes to my mental health, I focus on what I can control and work on that. And that gives me something to work towards rather than something to deal with or work through or manage my life through.”
Headlining one of the most popular TV shows on the planet, all while ignoring the tornado of speculation regarding his future in and out of the DCEU in the background, sounds like it may have actually taken a heavier toll on Cavill had he not got some time to rest and reset. It didn’t slow The Witcher down much in the grand scheme of things, and the star would have returned to the set raring to go and re-energized for good measure.
