Jodie Turner-Smith To Lead ‘Witcher’ Prequel Series ‘Blood Origin’
by Erik Amaya
The Witcher: Blood Origin has its lead.
Deadline reports Nightflyers‘ Jodie Turner-Smith will star in the six-part Netflix series. Set 1200 years before the events of the main Witcher series, it will chronicle the moment the Elven world merged with the worlds of men and monsters — and it will feature the arrival of the first Witcher. For her part, Turner-Smith will play Éile, a warrior turned traveling musician. Unfortunately, the changes to the Elven world will force her to take up arms once more in a “quest for vengeance and redemption.” The program is intended to be a limited series, so, presumably, this will be the one time we see Éile unless she somehow survives to the time of Geralt (Henry Cavill).
Declan de Barra serves as showrunner with The Witcher showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich serving as an executive producer.
It will be interesting to see how this format works as some prequel or spinoff material is better suited to a miniseries run than, say, a eight season epic. In fact, it would be nice to see this proliferate along genre lines as it will allow some stories to be more finite than, say, certain HBO programs which have to leave room for continuations and spinoffs. As it happens, The Witcher also has an end of sorts, but we’ll be stunned if Netflix uses it.
It is unclear how quickly Blood Origin will go into production, but filming on the second season of The Witcher continues and, hopefully, it will return later this year.
