The Witcher nearly cast Liam Hemsworth years ago

Fans of Netflix’s The Witcher are not happy about Henry Cavill’s departure. The streaming giant confirmed that after the show’s upcoming third season, Geralt will look pretty different, as Liam Hemsworth will be taking on the starring role from season four. The Australian actor starred as Gale in The Hunger Games movies, and, of course, is the younger brother of the lovely Chris Hemsworth (best known as Thor in the MCU).

Fans have even launched a petition in an effort to keep Cavill and fire the writers instead, which has kept on gaining traction - at the time of writing, it has over 180,000 signatures. However, it seems likely that the actor left the show due to his ongoing wish for the adaptation to stay true to the source material.

Gaze upon Henry Cavill's beloved portrayal of Geralt in this awesome Witcher pyrography art.

It turns out though that this uproar was almost entirely avoided, as the show apparently almost cast Liam Hemsworth as the original Geralt when it first started. Redanian Intelligence claims that, according to their sources, Hemsworth was one of the frontrunners for the role - it’s not known how highly he was ranked, but he was “among the favourites”. Considering that he’s the backup Geralt, it seems, maybe he was the crew’s second choice all along.

Redanian Intelligence’s report also claims that because of this, there wasn’t an elaborate process to recast Geralt once Cavill decided to step down - it’s believed that the producers probably just took a look at the old casting tapes and decided that he looks like a nice lad. The report didn’t say that last bit, but you get the point.

Reportedly, this process took place during the second half of summer this year, so it’d not been kept under wraps for too long. Interestingly, it’s rumoured that Sebastian Stan (AKA the MCU’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier) was also one of the frontrunners, which makes you wonder if fans would have reacted better to him than they have Hemsworth. Then again, we all just love Cavill, don’t we? So probably not.