The Witcher: Blood Origin: 'I ended up as the doorman at Brown Thomas'
L-R: Laurence O’Fuarain in Witcher: Blood Origin; showrunner Declan de Barra
Last year, actor Laurence O’Fuarain spent many precious hours talking to his hat. He was filming The Witcher: Blood Origin, a much-anticipated prequel to Netflix’s epic Witcher fantasy series which lands on Christmas Day.
But because the shoot, in locations across the UK and Iceland, was during the Covid lockdown, he was required to keep to himself when cameras weren’t rolling. Through those challenging days, his only company was a top hat.
“I worked at Brown Thomas on and off for five years,” says the affable O'Fuarain, a former advertising and marketing student at the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, from his home in Dublin.
“In the last two years, I ended up becoming the door-man, with the top hat. With Covid, there was no door staff. I was out of a job. I was taking the pandemic payment.”
When he was cast in Blood Origin he made sure to take with him a memento of his former life. “I brought the top hat with me. Just as a reminder. ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself. There’s going to be long days. Don’t complain about the work – do you want to wear me on Grafton Street in the rain again?’ I had the hat on top of my microwave.
"It was like my version of Wilson from Cast Away [the basketball with whom Tom Hanks strikes up a deep emotional connection in the Robert Zemeckis film]. I haven’t given him name yet – Harry the Hat maybe. Because it was lockdown, he was the only one I talked to.”
As the hero of Blood Origin, O’Fuariin has big boots to fill. The original Witcher was portrayed by Henry Cavill (who has since left the series, allegedly over creative differences with the showrunners).
The character O’Fuarain plays, warrior lord Fjall, is very different to Cavill’s Geralt. He is a mortal making his way in a young and violent world. Whereas Geralt is introduced as an experienced bounty hunter, Fjall is someone with a lot to prove. Aware The Witcher fanbase would compare him to Cavill O’Fuariin went to lengths to ensure he made an impact on screen.
“When I got cast, all the gyms were closed. I knew I didn’t look like a warrior. I needed some help. I trained for about a month [in Dublin]. Then I called Netflix: ‘I need somewhere to train’. They flew me over and put me up. Henry Cavill had a gym on set, on the studio lot. They gave me the keys – ‘right, the boot camp doesn’t start for another six weeks, you can use the gym’. So I went in there and trained. I was in there every single day. Boot-camp was another two months. By the time we shot, I was as big as I was going to get.”
Fantasy television brims with dreadful Irish accents – most recent example Amazon’s PTSD-inducing Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, where the hobbit characters all talk like shamrock-chewing refugees from Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
There are lots of Irish accents in Witcher: Blood Origin too – but for once they are authentic, starting with O'Fuarain, who speaks in his native Dublin tones. He credits the fact that the showrunner, Declan de Barra is a fellow Irish person.
“Declan created something I could fall into quite easily. And he let me bring a lot to it: there’s a very heavy Irish influence to Fjall. They really embraced that on set. They pushed me into it. Sometimes I’d dial it back. And they’d be, ‘no…keep going and we’ll find some gems’. So Fjall was very much a part of me. He was there on the page. And when we got to set, we found some other nuggets.”
Witcher: Blood Origin is sent 1,200 years before The Witcher and depicts the creation of the original Witchers – an order of potion-fuelled monster hunters – as well as the decline in the power of the elven race. It boasts a dizzying cast – including Minnie Driver, Dylan Moran, Michelle Yeoh and Lenny Henry, playing an evil sorcerer.
As O’Fuarain points out, Blood Origin has a distinctly Irish tone. In the first episode, we are introduced to the island of “Inis Dubh” – pronounced correctly – while O'Fuarain and his clan all sound like Dublin GAA fans who have rocked up on the set of the Witcher universe straight from Hill 16.
The Irish influence is no accident. Blood Origin show-runner Declan de Barra is from Waterford and has had a colourful career that includes a stint as a doorman at Whelan’s in Dublin and musical success fronting trad-electronica crossover band, Clann Zú. He got into writing for the screen through The Originals – a spinoff of the Vampire Diaries, followed by The Witcher, where he contributed scripts and worked as a producer.
Blood Origin is eagerly anticipated. It also arrives at an awkward moment for the franchise, with Cavill’s abrupt exit fuelling speculation he was fed up with the ever starker departures from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher novels (he is to be replaced as Geralt by Liam Hemsworth, brother of Thor actor Chris). Meanwhile, a former writer on the series, Beau DeMayo, has claimed that some of those working on the show “actively disliked” the books.
Questions about The Witcher surviving the departure of Cavill are best directed to the series show-runner Lauren Hissrich says, de Barra. In a personal capacity, he’s always loved The Witcher.
“I’m a massive fan. But I’ve also been on shows where I didn’t come into it as a fan. Where I have the technical ability to put my brain into it. When you come in as a writer on a show your job, in the American system, is basically to emulate the show runner. Everyone I hired on [Blood Origin] were writers who were all massive sci-fi and genre fans. Some moreso than me – ‘oh you haven’t read that’.
“But no, you don’t have to be [the biggest fan in the world of a property]. You have to be a great writer, you have to know how to adapt books to TV. If you do a literal translation of a book, it’s dead. It’s a skill you build up over the years. It’s a fine line between being over-reverent and honouring the tone.”
- The Witcher: Blood Origin debuts on Netflix on Christmas Day
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