The Witcher Star Henry Cavill Has A Surprising Hobby
It turns out that Henry Cavill is even more qualified to lead The Witcher than we thought.
The star of the hit Netflix series recently revealed in a conversation with GQ that he's not too keen on the nightlife; to escape from the pressures of celebrity, he'd prefer to hunker down in front of his PC for an hours-long gaming session.
Cavill said that unlike some stars, he's just not too enamored with the attention that comes with his profession. "Every time I step out my front door, I'm hyper aware," he said. "Even if I'm not looking terrible, you still realize there are people taking sneaky photos of you, because that's what people like to do. And then they put them on the internet and you see them on Instagram and you're like, 'Oh, my god.'"
Yeah, we've all been there... well, those of us that are international celebrities, at least. Cavill continued to say that he's more than happy to while away the hours in front of his gaming computer rather than going out and doing, you know, celebrity stuff: "At home, I get to sit playing games for ridiculous amounts of hours and escape there, because going outside has the opposite effect." What's his favorite game at the moment? That's easy: Total War: Warhammer II, the hit strategy game from Sega. Despite the fact that the game has only been out for less than a year and a half and can take dozens of hours to complete, Cavill has already played through it six times — "With six different races! And I love it each time," he says.
Has Henry Cavill actually played any of the Witcher games?
This raises an obvious question: just how much hands-on research, if any, has Cavill conducted into his character, Geralt of Rivia? Since he's such a big gamer, you'd think that he would have played one of the Witcher games at least once, right? Actually, no; he's played Witcher 3, which boasts about 100 hours of gameplay, twice, and he's working his way through it again. Unfortunately, he didn't find it to be quite the relaxing escape that he'd hoped.
"It's all well and good when you're trying not to stress out," he explained, "but then I realized I wasn't chilling out. I just ended up dying at the wrong points and thinking, 'I should not have left the roads. I don't know why I left the roads.' I couldn't run away fast enough, or my attention span dropped for a second or I answered a text, and now I'm dead and that's six or seven hours of gameplay that I've just messed up."
Okay, in all seriousness, we've definitely all been there. Cavill famously beat out something like 200 other actors to land the role of Geralt, and we'd like to think that his status as a hardcore gamer had something to do with that; in addition to having played his character as a video game avatar, he took it upon himself to read every book in author Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher series (upon which the games are based) after his first meeting with the series' showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich. Cavill says that he "absolutely loved them," and that being able to immerse himself in Witcher lore by way of multiple forms of media allowed him to approach his role not just as an actor, but as a fan.
"I want to do [the series] as true to the lore as possible," he said. "For me it was about bringing my love for the character to the show, as a fan — I want to protect it. It would've hurt my heart to hear there was a show that I didn't jump on, [especially] if someone else had a unique and perhaps even brilliant interpretation of Geralt, but one not who I, as a fan, [identify with]."
Cavill also revealed that Geralt's frequent use of "signs" in the series — magic spells unique to the Witcher world — can be chalked up largely to his insistence, as he was keen to let Hissrich know what he believed fans would want to see. "I really wanted to push that in there, because for me the audience must know he can do these things," he said. "It mattered to me, because it's all part of being a Witcher."
Well, fans may have been a bit skeptical that Cavill was right for the role of Geralt before The Witcher debuted on Netflix, but after getting a load of his performance, they seem to have changed their tune — and taking these remarks into account, it couldn't be any more obvious that Netflix landed the right guy to lead the series. Now, if only they'd make a series based on Warhammer. "There's just something about those games that I find so satisfying," Cavill said. "There's new DLCs coming out all the time, and I'm looking forward to whatever the next one is."
Cavill may be a huge star, but it's very cool to know that he's so like us: built like Superman and really, really into video games.