The overall mood of The Witcher fandom doesn’t seem to favor the live-action adaptation these days, and even the latest trailer for season three failed to change the attitude by a whole lot, so of course Freya Allan (Ciri) would talk about the one thing that would be the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the fire.
The actress recently chatted with SFX Magazine and revealed that Princess Cirilla’s storyline in season three is undergoing certain changes to accommodate her growth in book 5 and beyond.
“In the original script, I didn’t have as much action,” she said. “There was a lot of me standing around, waiting to get saved by Geralt and Yennefer.”
Season three is going to adapt the events of Time of Contempt, which will once again have Yennefer and Geralt going up against impossible odds to protect their ward, Ciri. At some point in the story, however, the Child of the Elder Blood is going to have to make her own way in the world, so to bridge the gap between that transition, the writers decided to give her more “action” stuff to do in the forthcoming run.
“If we are not seeing her do anything yet, and then in season four she is going and joining a gang of killing Rats, it’s not really going to add up. I wanted it to feel like she started to use that training and put that into real life, although she’s not killing anyone yet, or shouldn’t be.”
With the Rats, Allan is referencing a group of mercenaries that Ciri comes across in her travels. We’ve also been led to believe that Netflix is planning to develop a spin-off series based on the members of this warrior band, so we can expect to see a lot of them in the near future.
While there’s no telling just how much of Ciri’s story the show is going to change, it makes us wonder if these were the sorts of deviations that compelled Henry Cavill to depart the show. And that, of course, leads to another question: How much has changed in the course of this long development, and will we even recognize this revised plotline when season three premieres on June 27?