Fittingly for a character directly tied to The Law of Surprise, Ciri’s journey so far in The Witcher has been filled with plenty of shock moments.
From the first season’s forest reunion with Geralt, to training at Kaer Morhen and, now, split from her found family and under the protection of a new one – the urchin-like Rats – Ciri has to fight to survive in a Continent where she’s swiftly becoming the centre of attention and the key to political supremacy.
As fans of The Witcher books will be keenly aware, season 4 will follow the events of the novel Baptism of Fire, which features several major turning points in Ciri’s life.
To that end, self-confessed book fan and Ciri actor Freya Allan dipped back into the source material so that she could do justice to some of the character’s most defining scenes in the upcoming season on Netflix.
“Going into seasons four and five, I felt like I was carrying out some of my favorite Ciri storylines,” Allan told GamesRadar+. “So it meant a lot to me. I also think some of these storylines are things that fans have been waiting for for a while, and they’re kind of iconic moments in the book for Ciri.”
“More than ever, I relied on the source material a lot. I pulled a lot from that. It was really important for me to honor that, and I really had fans in my mind a lot of the time… I really wanted to make sure I knew every nook and cranny of Ciri’s story in the books.”
That attention to detail and slavish dedication to Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels was also noticed by showrunner and creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich.
“She’s a huge fan of the books, and she is the first one to come up with a dog-eared copy, and it’s underlined, and she’ll say, ‘I love the scene but it’s missing this moment, and I really want to figure out how to play this moment,'” Hissrich recalled.
“We wouldn’t have seen that from Freya in season one… I think that’s probably the best thing to see – a young woman finding her voice and finding that power in this role and in this environment.”
The Witcher season 4 releases on Netflix on October 30, and sees Liam Hemsworth take on the role of Geralt. For more, read our interview with Lauren Schmidt Hissrich about Hemsworth’s arrival. Then, dive into our picks for the best Netflix shows around.