The showrunner for the upcoming The Witcher prequel series The Witcher: Blood Origin, Declan De Barra has revealed a few details about how the series’ story came about and how the world in the series was created during an interview with EW. The Witcher: Blood Origin is a live-action prequel series to the Netflix hit series The Witcher and it tackles a major event in Witcher history, specifically the conjunction of the spheres (the phenomenon that brought humans, elves, and monsters in the same world together).
De Barra served as a writer and a producer on the original Witcher series, and he was approached by showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and Netflix executive Kelly Leugenbiehl over whether he had any ideas for a prequel series. According to Leugenbiehl, De Barra had his own pitch based only around “a few lines in the books.”
De Barra said this on how he mapped out the story for the series:
“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: what elves wanted in this world and what the society was like pre-colonization. That kind of stuck.”
“This whole time in [Andrzej Sapkowski‘s] books, he 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, would be right before the fall and then we’re in dark ages again. That fascinated me to wonder what that [elven] world could have been and what society would have been like. That’s what we’re going to explore here.”
While discussing a possibility of a second season De Barra said that the first season of Blood Origin has a very solid ending, and if the second season could happen is all “up to the fans.”
The Witcher: Blood Origin stars Sophia Brown as Éile, Michelle Yeoh as Scían, Nathaniel Curtis as Brían, Laurence O’Fuarain as Fjall, Lenny Henry as Balor. The release date for the series has not been announced by Netflix yet.