The Witcher: Blood Origin teaser lights the fires for an action-packed prequel series

Break open your spell books and sharpen your swords because a teaser for The Witcher: Blood Origin has arrived. Every story has to start somewhere, right? Well, in The Witcher: Blood Origin teaser, we’re introduced to a pre-colonized world of elves before the Conjunction of the Spheres. The what now? Yeah, to be honest, even the characters of The Witcher don’t know what that means. Not entirely. Thankfully, Polygon attempted to break it down, saying it refers to an event when all worlds (other spheres of existence) collided. Additionally, the Conjunction of Spheres is how monsters and magic – “chaos” – came into the world of The Witcher. With monsters running amok, the world needed Witchers to deal with them, thus the war between myth and monstrosity was waged.

Today’s The Witcher: Blood Origin teaser welcomes viewers into a world fraught with danger and teeming with new characters. Beautifully shot and set to an ethereal score, the new series looks to expand one of the newest (and richest) fantasy worlds on screen. Fans of The Witcher are sitting pretty right now between two seasons of the core series, two animated offerings, and other Witcher-related content that is sure to come.

While speaking about The Witcher: Blood Origin, showrunner Declan DeBarra and The Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich revealed how the prequel series came about:

“We were trying to understand what the world was like for elves right before the Conjunction of the Spheres. It’s very vague in the books as to what happened. I got out a whiteboard and sketched out this plan of what I thought,” said DeBarra.

What De Barra wrote on that whiteboard eventually led to the creation of the prequel series:

“I just was fascinated with the idea of what a pre-colonized world would look like for the elves. (The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski) reinterprets folktales and history. And when you look at our own history, societies that had been at their height, like the Roman Empire or the Mayan Empire, that’d be right before the fall and then we’re in dark ages again. That fascinated me to wonder what that world could have been: what society would have been like and what elves wanted. That’s what we’re going to explore here.”

Hissrich added:

“We have obviously heard in the Witcher show that humans brought civilization to the elves. They’re the ones who showed them what it was like to be civilized. And in fact, what we’re seeing in Blood Origin is that’s exact opposite of the truth. The world was much more of a Golden Age than what we see in The Witcher years later.”

Set 1,200 years before the events seen in the first season of The Witcher, the epic tale of The Witcher: Blood Origin will be told across six parts.

Blood Origin will star Laurence O’Fuarain as Fjall, who was born into a clan of warriors sworn to protect a King and is now on a quest for redemption; Sophia Brown as Éile, an elite warrior who left her clan to become a nomadic musician; Michelle Yeoh as Scían, the last from a tribe of sword-elves; Lenny Henry as a character named Balor; Mirren Mack as Merwyn; Nathaniel Curtis as Brían; Dylan Moran as Uthrok One-Nut; Jacob Collins Levy as Eredin; Lizzie Annis as Zacaré; Huw Novelli as Callan, a.k.a. “Brother Death”; Francesca Mills as Meldof; Amy Murray as Fenrik; and Zach Wyatt as Syndril.

Sarah O’Gorman (Cursed) is directing the first, fourth, and sixth episodes of the series. The second, third, and fifth episodes are being directed by Vicky Jewson (Close).

What do you think of The Witcher: Blood Origin teaser? Have you started Season 2 of The Witcher yet? Will you be checking this prequel series out when it drops in 2022? Let us know in the comments section below.