Listen up The Witcher fans! Matrix star Laurence Fishburne has been confirmed to star in Season Four of the hit fantasy series.
Fishburne joins Liam Hemsworth, Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan and Joey Batey in the highly anticipated fourth season of the show, which will return to production this Spring.
Fishburne will play the character of Regis, a fan favourite from the Witcher books and games who was introduced in Sapkowski’s novel Baptism of Fire. Regis is a world-wise Barber-surgeon with a mysterious past who joins Geralt on his journey in Season Four.
“I’m very excited to be joining the cast,” says Fishburne, “and look forward to exploring the wondrous world of The Witcher.”
After the shocking, Continent-altering events that close out season three, the new season follows Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri who are faced with traversing the war-ravaged Continent and its many demons apart from each other. If they can embrace and lead the groups of misfits they find themselves in, they have a chance of surviving the baptism of fire — and finding one another again.
Here are a few other things we know about Season Four…
Geralt will change his political standpoint
According to Tudum, after everything that happens in Season Three, Geralt realizes political neutrality is no longer tenable and chooses a side in Season Four.
“His side is Ciri and Yen, and he will do anything [for them],” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told Tudum back in April, explaining why Geralt fights off the corrupt soldiers in the finale as he heads to find Ciri. “He will get involved in anything he has to get into in order to make that happen.”
But Geralt won’t be alone on his quest to find Ciri and Yennefer, because he’ll have Jaskier and Milva by his side. “This is the beginning of what fans [of the books] will know as the Hanza. It’s the group traveling with Geralt for the rest of the books. This becomes his newfound family,” said Schmidt Hissrich. “He begins to realize that he needs help to get Yennefer and Ciri back, and when you need to help, you actually have to give of yourself as well. So, we start to watch the Hanza build and start to see that there are some amazing emotional connections to come there as well.”
Ciri finds a new family with the Rats
“I know for Freya, it’s so exciting for her to be working with people her own age,” explained Schmidt Hissrich. “[The Rats] are a band of misfit teenagers, and they get up to all sorts of fun and all sorts of trouble. It’s a completely different side of Ciri than we’ve seen before.”
Whether or not her powers are gone forever will also be explored in Season Four… “Did we want her to choose to give up her powers — meaning that she has them, but she’s not going to access them because she wants to rid herself of her prior identity? Or did she actually magically relinquish those powers and she no longer has access to them? You’ll have to watch Season 4 to wait and see which is true,” continued Schmidt Hissrich. “She can either continue living in the past or she can, at the end of her desert experience, push into the future. And she makes the choice for her future. I think in Season 4, that’s a decision she’s going to keep coming back to: How do you forget where you came from? And do you actually want to?”
Yennefer will have more difficult questions as the leader of Aretuza
“Now the Brotherhood and her mother figure — her leader — are gone, how does she want to start to lead? And what does she want to be within the magical society of this world?” Schmidt Hissrich wondered. “She has some big choices to make.”
We’ll find out more about Vilgefortz’s plan
“More of [the mechanics of his plan] will be revealed in Season 4,” confirmed Schmidt Hissrich. “The questions that our characters need to be asking [going into] Season 4 [are], ‘Why is he doing this?’ and ‘How is he doing this?’ When did Vilgefortz find Emhyr? Was it recently, when Ciri’s power first started to explode? Because we know that Emhyr came for her in Season 1 and burned down Cintra. Was Vilgefortz involved in that?
“We want people to go back and start looking at all of the clues and breadcrumbs that we have laid out to see how these two people align. Because clearly, there’s a lot more going on with Emhyr, Vilgefortz, and their past — and their future.”
The Witcher Season Three is currently available on Netflix. The release date Season Four is yet to be confirmed. Read our interview with stars Anya Chalotra, Freya Allan and Joey Batey who talk to us about Season Three of the series.
