The Witcher season 3 will be a 'heroic sendoff' for Henry Cavill

The Witcher season 3 will be Henry Cavill's last hurrah on the show, and that makes us sad. But at least he'll be going out in style, according to showrunner Lauren Hissrich, who told Entertainment Weekly that the upcoming season will give him an appropriately "heroic sendoff."

"Henry has given so much to the show and so we want to honor that appropriately," Hissrich said. The third season wasn't written specifically as a farewell to Cavill, but Hissrich said the material the season is based on—Time of Contempt, author Andrzej Sapkowski's second full novel and fourth Witcher book—is kind of a natural fit for the task.

"What is so interesting is that season three, to me, is the closest thing that we've done as a one-to-one adaptation of the books," Hissrich said. "Obviously, we can't do every page, but Time of Contempt gave us so many big action events, plot points, defining character moments, huge reveals of a big bad. There's so much to do that we were able to stick really, really closely with the books.

"Geralt's big turn is about giving up neutrality and doing anything that he has to do to get to Ciri. And to me, it's the most heroic sendoff that we could have, even though it wasn't written to be that. Geralt has a new mission in mind when we come back to him in season 4. He's a slightly different Geralt than we expected. Now, by the way, that's an understatement."

Cavill announced in early November that he was leaving The Witcher after the third season, to be replaced by Liam Hemsworth, brother to Thor actor Chris. With all due respect to Liam, the news made pretty much everyone sad, including us. Cavill's departure was widely assumed to be connected to his understandable pursuit of the Superman role in movies, which he announced he was returning to in October. 

But then he got hosed: After a cameo appearance at the end of Black Adam, new DC movie boss James Gunn decided he wanted to start afresh, and Henry—and virtually everyone else involved with the previous films—was out.

Some fans naturally hoped that losing the Superman gig would open the door to Cavill's return as Geralt, but Hissrich said that hasn't even been considered at this point. "We have plans to keep this going in various permutations," she said. "I love the mothership, I'm going to stick to it, but obviously we have Blood Origin coming out. I hope that this doesn't end for a while. So I think the possibilities are endless, and we'll see what happens."

The good news for Cavill is that even with The Witcher and Superman off his plate, he's still got lots to keep him busy: Amazon and Games Workshop announced last week that he's been tapped to produce and star in, as news writer Mollie Taylor put it, "a whole-ass cinematic universe" based on Warhammer 40,000. He's a well-known fan of the series, to the extent that Creative Assembly added him to Total War: Warhammer 2 in the 2020 DLC The Warden and The Paunch.