By The Witcher: Blood Origin, Netflix’s six-part limited series Witcher spinoff has been in the making for quite some time and now there’s big news to report. Deadline just announced the first lead to star in the upcoming show. Jodie Turner-Smith will play the character Éile, an elven woman who we already knew about from previous casting reports. Deadline describes her part as:
an elite warrior blessed with the voice of a goddess, who has left her clan and position as Queen’s guardian to follow her heart as a nomadic musician. A grand reckoning on the continent forces her to return to the way of the blade in her quest for vengeance and redemption
Turner Smith is a British actress of Jamaican descent, known for her work on The Last Ship, George R. R. Martin’s Nightflyers, and her breakthrough role in Queen and Slim, for which she has received widespread acclaim. Casting director Sophie Holland tweeted in response to the news that finding the character has been a very exciting process.
The Witcher: Blood Origin is headed by Declan De Barra, responsible for penning the fourth episode of The Witcher‘s first season. The Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich serves as an executive producer on the show. It is set in a world 1200 years before the start of the main show and will cover the events leading up to the Conjunction of the Spheres and the creation of the first witcher.
This is exciting! Remember, we already know about a few more characters set to appear in Blood Origin including another elf called Fjall, who was described as sort of a rival to Éile, hailing from an opposing clan. With today’s news out, we hope there’ll be more to follow soon. Stay tuned!
They can use the costumes from the first series worn by two black warrior women with a far better sword attached to their backs than Geralt’s.
Probably the best costumes and swords in the first series and so little time on the screen.
I’m super excited about this. Between s2 of the main series, the nightmare of the wolf and blood origin, 2021 will be a very Witchery year🔥⚔️
I must admit the actress is beautiful. Normally I would be angry about so many bla… sorry diverse cast, but as prequel they could actually make all those asian, middle-eastern and black people had some kind of origins that would be coherent or maybe even make some sense. In GOT there were all reaces, numerious nationalities and it was nice an refreshing, but it made sense. Putting people for sake of it is cheap and lazy, it causes harm to actors and divides fans
There is no cohesion in the forced diversity, in the first season of witcher show we had random black and asian among the ‘Nordlings’ who are quasi medieval Europeans on design of the author (the northern kingdoms are heavily based on European medieval culture so additionally netflix erases all cultural context of the work they are supposedly adapting), so these black and asian folks were put in roles of quasi europeans in the same clothes as if implying that black and asian people can’t have culture of their own (which should be problematic), there was no consistency in this as well, since also the Zerrikanians an eastern culture were portrayed by black actresses, but we also had a black actor playing a medieval cintran knight named…Danek, a slavic name, so this is cultural appropriation that so many talk about :). Besides this actress is supposed to play an elf, Aen Seidhe elf, but as we already had a pale white folk playing Filavandrel an elven ‘noble’ of an ancient family and a black boy playing an elven orphan we can guess that their portrayal of the race of Aen Seidhe will be as multiracial as humans for some reason, even though all elves in books were white even the otherworld race of Aen Elle hehe. Don’t try to find consistency in those casting choices really.