The Witcher season 4 rewrites the books to give Yennefer a bigger plotline
Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich and star Anya Chalotra discuss how the character got a bigger role on the show than she had in the books

The sorceress leads the fight against Vilgefortz

The Witcher season 4 rewrites the books to give Yennefer a bigger plotline

Season 4 of Netflix’s The Witcher combines plots from Andrzej Sapkowski’s books Baptism of Fire and The Tower of the Swallow, which scatter the fantasy series’ main characters across a war-torn world. The show is fairly faithful to the stories of Geralt of Rivia (Liam Hemsworth), who spends the season traveling with a ragtag group dubbed the Hansa; and Ciri (Freya Allen), who joins a bandit group called the Rats. But showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich had to create a new story arc for the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who spends much of Baptism of Fire transformed into a jade statue.

“I remember talking to [Chalotra] very early to say we’re not going to do that with you,” Hissrich said during a Zoom roundtable Polygon attended. “Obviously we have had to create some Yennefer storylines from the ground up. This season brought, for me at least, an entirely new flavor for the character. I always refer to it as Yennefer’s woman on fire season because that’s what it feels like.”

In the books, the elven sorceress Francesca Findabair turns Yennefer into a statue during the battle of Thanedd and keeps her in that form for a month and a half until restoring her at a gathering of sorceresses seeking to protect the future of magic. The show flips the script, having Yennefer transform Francesca (Mecia Simson) into a statue and bring her to join a group Yennefer unites to oppose the traitorous sorcerer Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), who is hunting Ciri.

“[Yennefer’s] always wanted to be a leader for the wrong reasons, I would say, or reasons that have stemmed from trauma, desperation, and rage,” Chalotra said. “This season she needs this position to be able to help the Continent and her child.”

That arc is crucial to what Hissrich sees as the very heart of the series.

“I always have gone back to the same thing since season 1, which is, it’s a story about family finding their way back to each other,” she said. “The sword fighting, the monsters, those are the bells and whistles. But at its core, it’s just a story about characters who long to be together even though they’ve been pulled apart.”

The Witcher season 4 premieres on Netflix on Oct. 30.