Henry Cavill's Geralt Voice In The Witcher Came About By Complete Accident
In Projekt CD Red's "The Witcher" video game series, Geralt of Rivia (voiced by the brilliant Doug Cockle) sports a gravelly baritone, and he can be heard musing about the weather or grunting in disdain from time to time. While Geralt's personality is painstakingly fleshed out over the course of three lore-heavy games and three expansion packs, his voice factors majorly into the first-person character immersion. After all, the way Geralt speaks reflects most of his worldviews, where the monster slayer sways between subtle sarcasm and calm distaste, depending on the situation he is in. Geralt is also capable of being gentle, and it is endearing to listen to his conversations with Ciri, or his lighthearted banter with Dandelion, who brings out Geralt's softer side with ease.
Trying to hone in on Geralt's signature voice in a highly-anticipated live-action adaptation of the popular franchise is a tall order. However, Henry Cavill, who played the titular character "The Witcher" adaptation on Netflix for three seasons before departing, was able to perfectly capture the essence of the character, granting Geralt a similar baritone without mimicking the intonation of Cockle's performance. By doing this, Cavill was able to make Geralt his own, while still being faithful to the source material. Though the Netflix series has struggled with doing justice to the books on many occasions, Cavill's Geralt has always felt right, and worthy, when matched up against Andrzej Sapkowski's creation.
During 2021's WitcherCon, hosted by Netflix, Cavill explained how his signature Geralt voice was actually a product of pure accident, and he explained his thought process behind approaching the voice of such a seminal character. Here's what Cavill had to say about the need to come up with his own rendition of how the monster slayer should sound like.
A happy accident
Cavill revealed that he did not put on a special voice for Geralt during the audition, as showrunner Lauren. S. Hissrich was okay with a performance without deliberate vocal rasps or intonations. Soon after, Cavill was cast as Geralt, and while shooting the first season's King Foltest sequence, Cavill accidentally put on a different voice and realized that it worked better for the character and the kind of person he represented:
"I think it was Episode 3, actually King Foltest, that scene where I lock everyone out of the room and walk back in. I didn't do that intentionally. That happened by accident... And then afterward, I was like, 'Oh my god, I just played a whole scene in the wrong voice.' And I realized that the voice made a lot of things sit better when it came to the delivery of certain lines and the delivery of certain dialogue. And I thought, 'I actually kind of prefer this.'"
The King Foltest sequence is the one in which Geralt is granted emotional motivation to save the cursed princess, highlighting that Geralt is more than a monster hunter for hire, as he is a man who empathizes without explicitly taking sides. The fact that Cavill was able to find his Geralt voice during this scene is serendipitous, as it works much better for the character without sounding too divorced from his natural voice, which is also deep and gravelly to an extent.
Cavill also explained that he wanted his voice to be different enough from Cockle's voicework, having been eager to do his own thing while respecting another professional's work. Needless to say, Cavill succeeded in infusing Geralt with appropriate gravitas and nuance throughout three seasons. As for what awaits next for Geralt of Rivia, only time will tell.