🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
If you thought Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) traveled a lot as he slayed monsters and defended his chosen family across the Continent, wait until you find out how much traveling the production team did in Season 3.
Filming the eight episodes of The Witcher Season 3 took the cast and crew through several different countries. The team journeyed far from their home at Longcross Studios outside of London to various locations throughout England, Wales, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, and Morocco. “I won’t lie, it’s a really hard show to make,” creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told Tudum on the set of the epic fantasy drama during a visit in the summer of 2022. “And we don’t move in a small way. We move hundreds of people and monsters and costumes and huge stunt teams.”
Clearly, telling a story of this magnitude requires large crews who ensure that the tiniest of details are ingrained in every last scene. With Season 3 now streaming in its entirety, we’ve conjured up some of the most enchanting minutiae, from subtle nods to the original novels to the months-long making of a monster. Let’s dive into this portal of fascinating context that you may or may not have been privy to.
Filming the ball and subsequent battle at Aretuza in Episodes 5 and 6 took weeks, and director Loni Peristere created a backstory for every actor. “He has these little index cards that he’s handed out to every single background actor,” said Schmidt Hissrich. “And they have, ‘Here’s your name, here’s why you’re here. Here’s your special skill. You’re a drunk, you like wine, you like to dance’ — whatever it is so that they can own their own story.”
Jaskier (Joey Batey) is the Continent’s preeminent bard, the biggest rock star in the Witcher universe. To drum up inspiration, Batey chose a different real-life musician to channel each season. “Season 1 was a bit young Bowie trying to work out what it is, what he wants to do. Very performative. Season 2 we got into late Freddie Mercury, coming out with these epic, angry songs,” Batey told Tudum during that 2022 visit. In Season 3, Batey and composer Joseph Trapanese decided that John Lennon is Jaskier’s biggest inspiration. “He’s maybe brought down some of the showman in order to use the music and his art as a way of now exploring his own feelings and exploring themes that he’s perhaps previously been putting aside for more performative energy,” said the actor.
The season’s most disgusting, most complicated, most fearsome monster was a months-long process to create, which required the collaboration of nearly every department. According to production designer Andrew Laws, the flesh monster was the biggest challenge of Season 3. “How do we realize this? Exactly how does it work? Does it have four legs? Does it have two legs? Does it stand up? Does it wave its arms? Does it have magic?” asked Laws during Tudum’s 2022 set visit as he explained the many questions they had to answer while conceiving the beast. “We had to deal with the dynamism of it between prosthetics, our creature concept design, VFX, and try to figure out how to evolve this thing and make sense out of it. It’s a creature that only could have happened in Season 3. It only happened because we were able to have such a shorthand with each other and understanding how we deal with all these things.”
Even though production visited several different countries to bring Season 3 to life, much of the season was filmed in the brand new back lot built at Longcross Studios. The timber is mostly real — burned and power washed to age it, of course — but the rocks are made of plaster. (If you look really closely, you might begin to see repeating patterns.) The outdoor location is usually temperate, but it got so hot during the UK’s heatwave that all the candles melted.
Hair and makeup head Deb Watson worked on Season 2 and prequel series The Witcher: Blood Origin, and was able to recycle lots of makeup and prosthetics and wigs to use in multiple seasons. After Season 2, she separated out all the main cast’s supplies and used the rest of what was left to film Blood Origin. “We can recycle, reuse, do whatever,” Watson said during Tudum’s 2022 visit. “Same thing when we got to the end of Blood Origin. I can scoop up all of that stuff and bring it back into my stock and go, ‘Right, now I’ve got all of those things for Season 3.’ ”
Sharp-eyed fans might catch Gallatin’s (Robbie Amell) Dog Clan tattoo, a piece that was inspired by Lark, a bard whose ballads gave hope to lowborn elves in Blood Origin.
When Radovid (Hugh Skinner) meets Jaskier, he references one of the bards from Blood Origin, stating, “ ‘Song of the Seven’ is my favorite.”
The shears that Yarpen (Jeremy Crawford) carries have an elven engraving on their blades that reads “testicle tickler.”
If you keep on the lookout during scenes taking place in Temeria’s bustling city of Gors Velen, you’ll catch some anti-elven graffiti that reads, “A good elf is a dead elf” and “Burn Dol Blathanna.” Dol Blathanna is Elder Speech for “Valley of the Flowers,” a sacred elven kingdom that elves were forced out of during the Great Cleansing.
Your mouth might water when you see Ciri devouring doughnuts, a treat she also famously eats in The Time of Contempt, the second installment in The Witcher novels.
A portrait of young Tissaia (MyAnna Buring) can be spotted in her living quarters, and this painting is also referenced in the novels.
There’s a lot of action happening when the Thanedd coup kicks off in Episode 6, titled “Everybody Has a Plan ’til They Get Punched in the Face,” but as Geralt points out amidst the chaos, the Redanians are wearing gray arm bands. In the novels, Geralt realizes he can identify “the different factions within the putsch by their uniforms,” which are also gray.
