Henry Cavill's raspy Geralt voice in The Witcher was a complete accident

Whoops?

If you’ve played CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher game trilogy, you might have noticed some similarity in Geralt’s voice from both the games and Netflix series. Henry Cavill’s performance as Geralt has a deep, raspy quality similar to voice actor Doug Cockle’s performance in the games. Fun fact: That was a total accident.

During a WitcherCon interview last weekend, Cavill revealed that his Geralt voice was meant to be quite different. He had asked show runner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich if he could add some rasp to his voice, but Hissrich turned him down - telling him to stick with his own natural voice instead. That was the plan, and it would have made Geralt sound quite different in the series.

However, after returning from a Christmas filming break to shoot a conversation between Geralt and King Foltest (which you can view above), Cavill just…forgot. He only realised that he’d added a rasp to his voice until the entire scene was done, saying, “That happened by accident, and then afterwards I was like, 'Oh my god, I just played a whole scene in the wrong voice'."

It turned out to not be a complete disaster, however. Cavill ended up liking his new Geralt voice quite a bit, saying that, “made a lot of things sit better when it came to delivery of certain lines, and delivery of certain dialogue." It was absolutely inspired by the games he had played before starring in the show, and he was worried about that similarity, saying:

I know it's very similar to Doug Cockle's amazing work. That was definitely a concern. I don't want to seem like I'm plagiarizing another professional's extraordinary work. I had a look at it, had a listen to it, and I thought, actually they are different enough. It's clearly inspired by—but I did my own thing, and then I spoke to Alec and I spoke to Lauren, and they both said, 'It's okay, actually, if you want to do that, we can go with that, and we'll redo the rest."

You can check out the full interview in the video below. It’s actually pretty entertaining - Cavill drops Warhammer 40K references, brags about his RTX 3090 and admits he couldn’t beat The Witcher 3 on its hardest difficulty.

The Witcher Season 2 hits Netflix on Dec 17, but we’re also getting an animated movie next month!

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.