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It is a bittersweet day for Anya Chalotra. On the one hand, The Witcher, the fantasy epic in which she has played super-sorcerer Yennefer of Vengerberg since 2018, is about to return for a fourth series. All the hard work she and hundreds of others have done can finally be seen by millions of fans worldwide. The cast and crew wrap party is due to take place a few hours after we speak. It’s an exciting time for the actor. But on the other hand: “I wrapped The Witcher for good yesterday,” Chalotra says. “So forgive me if I can’t string a sentence together. It’s all very odd … I cried a lot.”
Refreshingly for a big-budget fantasy show, The Witcher will bow out with its story complete, rather than at some dissatisfying midpoint due to an unceremonious cancellation. And though viewers will be seeing a final season of monsters, magic, mages, swords, skulduggery and swearing next year, the final two seasons were filmed back to back, meaning after the evening’s shindig, that’s that. The job that has taken over Chalotra’s life for so long, and the people who go with it (besides one high-profile absence, which we’ll touch on later), is finally over.
“I was 23 when I started,” Chalotra, now 30, says. “It’s been a long time. I think the most emotional I got was when I was sat there yesterday watching everyone work. Just in my chair, drinking a cup of tea. You know these people … everyone works so hard on the show. Eight months of a year for seven years. I’m going to miss everyone’s faces.”
It has been a long journey, for the actor and the character. The Witcher began as a series of short stories and novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski about monster hunter for hire Geralt of Rivia, which then became a hugely successful video game franchise before Netflix brought Sapkowski’s world to TV. Chalotra’s character begins the tale as a 14-year-old peasant girl, abused by her parents because of her physical deformities, who eventually becomes the ass-kicking mage, military leader and love of Geralt’s life we know today. When Chalotra was cast, she thought it important to do her research, playing the games and getting stuck into the books, of which she remains a fan: “When I was going back to the books this season, there’s some remarkable lines. Some incredible quotes. It’s so grounded for a fantasy.” She carried that groundedness over to the way she played Yennefer, making burning thousands of soldiers to a smouldering crisp with apocalyptic flame spells or the quiet grief of learning she was unable to have children equally plausible. It’s a fine balance, not easy to strike.
Chalotra was born in Wolverhampton, her father from India and her mother from the Midlands (the mention of which elicits a hoot of “Midlands! Yaaaaay!”). “I was a middle child,” she laughs, considering why she thinks she became an actor. “I don’t need to say any more!” But she pinpoints her mixed heritage as a huge element of her desire to perform: “I watched a lot of Bollywood as a kid. I loved musicals, film, watching very different experiences of people on stage, on screen. Because I only had my own experience, coming from quite a strict upbringing. So I was so curious about other people’s lives. Wanting to find out more about why someone is the way they are, their culture. I was very heavily influenced by my culture. And I think I was just interested in how people were created.”
A desire to use acting to find out what made her and the people around her tick led Chalotra to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and then to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. “There was nothing else that came into my head that I wanted to do,” she says. “I didn’t think it was possible until about 17 years old when I got in and I realised that my family were going to support me. And going to London from Wolverhampton. That was a huge shift.”
That commitment paid off quickly. Not long after graduating, she was nominated for a Stage Debut award in a Globe production of Much Ado About Nothing in 2017, and then in 2018 starred with Toni Collette in the BBC’s Wanderlust, and John Malkovich and Shirley Henderson in Agatha Christie adaptation The ABC Murders. “Shirley Henderson, Toni Collette, John Malkovich,” she lists. “That’s it – I’m happy. I was so curious, I almost didn’t want to do any work. They’re doing it in front of you. You’re so close. I just wanted to watch them.”
It was shortly afterwards that Chalotra was cast in The Witcher, and everything changed. It was her first taste of the intensity of geek culture, for better and for worse. The third Witcher game, considered one of the greatest of all time, has sold in excess of 60m copies worldwide; the books more than 15m by the time Chalotra took the role. Season one of the show in 2019 broke Netflix’s records as its most-watched debut series ever up to that point. That’s some enthusiastic fandom. “I was chucked into it,” Chalotra says. “A baptism of fire. Daunting, but so thrilling.” Sadly, as with many women of minority ethnic backgrounds cast in popular franchises, a small yet vocal corner of the internet protested her involvement on the grounds of her having the temerity not to match the exact image of the character each individual fan had in their heads. “I’m not on social media. I stopped,” says Chalotra. “I haven’t been on it for a long time. The first season, for me … there was a lot of negativity. A lot of positive as well, but obviously the negative … This was one of my first jobs. It hit me hard. I learned very quickly that it can all be quite intense.”
Eight months filming a year for seven years was also intense, though the bulk of it took place at Longcross Studios in the UK. “We try to travel as much as we can,” she says, but handily, at least for budgetary reasons, the studio’s surroundings have “a lot of green”, and when a different type of green is called for, they do “a fair bit of filming in Wales”. This at least allowed Chalotra, who lives in London, to retain some semblance of normality when off the clock. “But even when you are filming here, you don’t get much downtime,” she says. “And so those moments, when you do come off set and get home, you want to keep to yourself anyway. I get home and eat something and have a shower, kind of like washing off Yennefer. Eight months is such a lot of a year to be in the headspace of a character. You go in the next day and you’re doing the same thing. I have had to learn so many tools to try to separate myself from this job. I have found that really tough, and continue to.”
For these final two seasons, there was also the added complication of the show’s previous Geralt, Henry Cavill, departing after season three due to the time constraints of filming and different ideas about how his character should be portrayed than those of the showrunners. Into his gruff shoes steps Liam Hemsworth, who brings a new vulnerability to the baritone badass, which does the character no harm whatsoever. When Cavill left, did Chalotra think that could be the end of the show? Another fantasy epic left half-finished on the scrapheap of cancellation?
“No, actually,” she says. “I think I always knew we’d all continue. With the love for the material, we knew that it was going to go again. I was excited to see where Yennefer went, that’s for sure.” The cast and crew were also eager to make Hemsworth feel welcome – Chalotra is adamant no hazing rituals or ribbing of the new boy occurred. “We didn’t want to be too intense,” she laughs. “We just wanted to make space for Liam. He understands people. He understands this world. He was able to come in so naturally. It was really easy.” (Hemsworth himself has rather sweetly described the experience as being like “changing school halfway through the year”.)
For one day more, at least, Chalotra seems happy to still be very much in Witcher World. She describes the previous day of filming, and how when casting spells, even after seven years, she still makes “Whoosh!” and “Fzzzzzt!” noises when performing the hand gestures. “You’ve got to, right?! Someone’s always saying: ‘Anya, now can we do a take without the sound effects?’ Fine, I’ll try!”
She is tight-lipped about her next projects, and says “the next stage of my life is about rewilding”, though she is set to star alongside Ralph Ineson and Euphoria’s Chloe Cherry in the dark thriller Two Neighbors, which played at this year’s Edinburgh film festival. She is also about to go straight into a “short period of filming”, though insists “it doesn’t mean that I won’t be grieving Yennefer. We’re all just so connected by these seven years. I think we’ll be trying to distil this experience for a long time. And what will always be a constant is how much we love and respect the people who were next to us doing it.”
Nevertheless, it’s time to step off the juggernaut, and Chalotra is reflective. “This character’s in me and I’ve let her go. So it’s not sad at all really, it’s a new beginning.”
But first, there’s the small matter of the wrap party. You can’t help but think she’s earned it.
The first episode of season four of The Witcher is on Netflix from 30 October.
