Netflix’s The Witcher has always had striking set design, bringing to life the ruined yet welcoming witcher keep Kaer Morhen and the mysterious splendor of the magical academy Aretuza. But when the set designers built a haunted swamp for Geralt of Rivia (Liam Hemsworth) and his allies to trudge through in The Witcher season 4, it proved a little too realistic for the show’s stars.
“Creatures were living in the sound stage, and it was hot, and it was humid, and it was sticky, and you could smell it,” Laurence Fishburne said during a virtual roundtable that Polygon attended. “There was something about just being in that for all those hours, wet, in the water. We were in a terrarium.”
In order to escape the swamp, Geralt must fight a creature who plays tricks on his mind and animates vines to carry his friends away. On the set, the actors also encountered some very real creatures, including insects and spiders.
“Part of what the producers really wanted to do was bring in trees rather than use other materialsm,” said Joey Batey, who plays the bard Jaskier. “They wanted real foliage in there that they could unearth and then re-transplant back into the ground for environmental and sustainability reasons, which meant there were birds flying around us. It was also impossible to traverse. Our director fell in at one point.”
As unpleasant as this was, it did make the experience of navigating hostile terrain feel very real for the actors.
“If you were standing in the middle of that swamp, you were pretty much fully immersed in the swamp,” Hemsworth said. “It wasn’t a sound stage around you. The camera guy may be there, but you were in a swamp.”
The Witcher season 4 is streaming now on Netflix.
