It turns out that Henry Cavill was an absolute nightmare to keep clean on the set of Netflix’s Witcher series.
We might still be a long way off from The Witcher Season 2, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t get some insights into how Season 1 was filmed. A brand new interview with Vanity Fair reveals that Henry Cavill was a very dedicated actor when it came to playing Geralt of Rivia, right down to insisting that his costume be as dirty as possible for some of Geralt’s grimiest scenes.
“The costumers were, towards the end, quite horrified with me,” Cavill admits in an interview with Vanity Fair. “Before takes I would look at myself and say, ‘We need more dirt on me.’ They’d come up to me with this tiny little—it’s like a pair of tights rolled up into a ball, with some dust in, and they’d sort of pat it on me. And I’d say, ‘Yeah, guys, that’s not enough.’
“So I’d go stand out in the rain. Sometimes I’d roll around in puddles. I would just try and get as much of the world on me, so this character looked like he had lived within it.”
Cavill is a self-admitted Witcher fanboy. He’s read all the books and played all the games, and even hangs out on Witcher subreddits to read the finer points of his portrayal of Geralt.
Besides the grime, Geralt’s hair was another aspect of the character that Cavill insisted the show get just right. “The wig was a long, long journey,” recounts Cavill. “Jacqui Rathore, who was in charge of the wig for me, she was having nightmares about that wig. She was taking it home every night—I think she had three of them—she was taking them home every night, working on them more and more and more. But by the end of the show, by episode one reshoots, fortunately, the wig was just on point.”
Initially, that wig was white, but it had turned an appropriate shade of grey by the end of the series. The mud probably had something to do with that.
Read the whole interview over on Vanity Fair to find out just how far Cavill was willing to go in order to get Geralt to look just right, including wear contacts that were rubbing his eyeballs raw.
Source: Vanity Fair
