The One Detail That Made Laurence Fishburne Join The Witcher Season 4

The fourth season of Netflix's "The Witcher" brought several new faces to the fantasy series. Liam Hemsworth stepped in to replace Henry Cavill as Geralt of Rivia, so he had some big shoes to fill. Laurence Fishburne also joined the show's cast, and he faced a different kind of pressure, because his character is seriously important to "Witcher" fans: He took on the role of Regis.

Fishburne's character (whose full name is Emiel Regis Rohellec Terzieff-Godefroy) is the first vampire in "The Witcher." Fishburne got excited about the role because of all the ways that Regis doesn't live up to the vampire stereotype. "Part of the reason I wanted to do this show is because Regis is a vampire who doesn't drink blood," the actor told Netflix. "I've never seen that before; that's really interesting."

That's as good a reason as any, and there's no doubt that the veteran thesp's portrayal of Regis is one of the best things that "The Witcher" currently has to offer. Unsurprisingly given the furore around the change of lead actor, "The Witcher" Season 4 was a failure for Netflix, but, despite that, we're genuinely interested in seeing what's next for Fishburne's age-old vampire.

Laurence Fishburne's character has a long history in the "Witcher" series. Regis was introduced in the fifth book of the series, "Baptism of Fire." In that book, fans learned that Regis is more than four hundred years old and that he was addicted to drinking blood in the early years of his vampiric life. Since then, Regis has given up blood, and he's able to walk in the daylight alongside Geralt and his other party members.

Regis goes on to become an important member of Geralt's team. He appears in "The Tower of the Swallow" and again in "The Lady of the Lake," the final book of the series. Regis also appears in "The Witcher 3," and the game's expansion, "Blood and Wine," retcons his death. In the game, after Regis is destroyed by Vilgefortz de Roggeveen, another vampire named Dettlaff van der Eretein finds the last bits of his remains and slowly nurses him back to health, setting Regis off on a new batch of adventures.

Some people think that Netflix's "The Witcher" should have ended after Season 3, but if that had happened, fans would have never gotten to see Fishburne's take on Regis. The show and Fishburne have given fans a more-or-less faithful adaptation of Regis so far, though there's no telling where the story will go. "The Witcher" wraps up after its fifth season, so, one way or another, the writers will need to give their version of Regis a definitive ending.