'The Witcher' Season 3 tops Netflix charts with 'masterclass' performances, before Henry Cavill departure

The Witcher Season 3: Volume 1 quickly became the most popular show on Netflix, since its June 30 release (15.2 million views), marking the beginning of the end of Henry Cavill's portrayal of Geralt of Rivia, as we go deeper into characters played by Cassie Clare, Freya Allan, Anya Chalotra and Joey Batey.

At the beginning of Season 3, we see this satisfying family unit created between Geralt, Yennefer (Chalotra) and Ciri (Allan), but Chalotra wasn't even sure where this season could go for her character after betraying Geralt and Ciri so massively by the end of Season 2.

“I didn't know how I was going to do it, ... I didn't know how any of us were going to get over that, but we had to,” Chalotra told Yahoo Canada. “What's crucial is that a year has passed, where they've spent time together as a three and Yennefer has been teaching Ciri magic, kind of proving herself useful and working hard to gain their trust.”

“I think after losing everything in Season 2, she realizes actually what she wants."

What Chalotra picked out as a highlight for Season 3 was exploring the mother-daughter relationship between Ciri and Yennefer.

"After all this time, after all your searching you finally did it. ... Became a mother," Tissaia (MyAnna Buring) says to Yennefer when they arrive in Aretuza, in an attempt to help Ciri hone her magic.

“I think it feels very much at the very beginning like teacher-student, and then as they are sent off on a journey together, they have to kind of trust in each other," Allan described.

“Ciri learns so much more about Yennefer that she never realized. She saw her as the sort of perfect woman and that's all flipped on its head when Yennefer sort of opens up. … I think that they both learn a lot from each other, they both find a lot of commonality within one another, but they challenge one another."

Joey Batey, Hugh Skinner together is a 'masterclass'

Beloved by many, the character of Jaskier (Batey) still gives us all the wit and sarcasm we love, but we also get more of a glimpse into his true emotions, with the beginning of a romance between Jaskier and Prince Radovid (Hugh Skinner).

Hugh Skinner highlighted that the "extremity" of the situations his character is put in are "rare" to get to play with as an actor.

"Every scene there's sort of a set of circumstances and the stakes and what was going on, they take a real leap of the imagination on one level, because there's so much going on, but then on another level, they're incredibly human and there's something hopefully quite sort of simple and truthful to play," Skinner said.

Speaking about working with Batey specifically, Skinner described his co-star as "brilliant," "charismatic," "warm and welcoming."

"He's just really fun to act with," Skinner said. "He ad libs and stuff, and you just have to sort of listen and try and tell the truth."

For Cassie Clare, who we luckily get to see more of in Season 3 as Philippa Eilhart, she highlighted that it was a "masterclass" to watch Batey and Skinner play off each other.

“There were scenes that I got to kind of observe. … Philippa's there but she's observing [Radovid] with the Jaskier," Clare said. "You almost don't have to act those moments where Philippa's like, 'I think something could happen here,' because you could feel this chemistry and them playing off each other, and being so present."

"You had to be so present, throwing lines in and the script is so in your body that they could play around that. It was beautiful. It was like a masterclass, being an owl on the shoulder watching over here.”

With Batey playing Jaskier in not just The Witcher series, but in the previously released prequel The Witcher: Blood Origin as well, the actor feels "honoured" to continue to play this character.

“It’s one of the greatest joys of my professional career,” Batey said. “I get to live in this character and find out more and more about him every season, every scene, every moment.”

“He's always just kind of fascinated me and there's only so much I can devour in the books, and then the games and then just come to this and find the scripts that are taking him in all kinds of places that I didn't know about. ... I consider myself very lucky.”

'I'm a little bit embarrassingly obsessed with Philippa'

By far, one of the most exciting and intriguing characters in Season 3 is absolutely Philippa, with Clare completely stealing every scene she's in.

“I'm a little bit embarrassingly obsessed with Philippa. I want her to be my friend," Clare said. “I learned so much from playing her."

"Sometimes you have to put yourself in emotions or energies that don't come naturally to you, and it teaches you something about yourself. There's something about the stillness of Philippa. ... She's still and stood in her truth, and her focus, and it's taught me to be a bit more present sometimes, to listen before I speak. But the thing that draws me to her the most is how layered she is. I've been studying her as a character and I've not got to the core. I feel like there's still so much more that I need to learn and want to learn about her.”

But there's a theme in The Witcher's most recent season: It's the women, broadly, who give us the stand-out performances, and we even get more screen time for MyAnna Buring as Tissaia, and Therica Wilson-Read as Sabrina, when the story moves to Aretuza.

"It gives them a voice," Buring said about how The Witcher series amplifies the women characters in its story. "Lets them be flawed and lets them be powerful, and all the juxtapositions in one."

"I think that is what makes a rounded character, what makes it really fun to play. Instead of just been given one note, you're given a whole plethora of things to explore."

If there's one thing we know about The Witcher, after two-and-a-half seasons of the series, plus a prequel series, is that the fans have been and will continue to be very vocal about what they love, and don't love, in Netflix's adaption of the story and the characters.

But this isn't famed actor Graham McTavish's first rodeo in a show with a massive fan following, also starring in Outlander and House of the Dragon. In terms of working with that fan pressure, McTavish's approach is to "try and not pay too much attention to that."

"It can just mess you up completely, when you go on set to try and portray a character and people have conflicting views," McTavish said.

“I remember, going back to when I first started on Outlander, they had my makeup test and the makeup artist, the designer said ‘well, in the books he has long hair and a ponytail, and he's clean shaven.' And I said, 'it's weird because I see him as bald with a beard,' and that's how he ended up being. But joking aside, it is what you make it and to some degree, there's nothing you can do about it."