We were joined on the Popternative show by Doug Cockle to discuss returning to voice Geralt of Rivia in the new Netflix animated film, The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep. The film premiered on the platform on February 11, and is set between Episodes 5 and 6 of The Witcher Season 1. The Witcher universe is inspired by the series of books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, and Sirens of the Deep is based on his short story, “A Little Sacrifice.”
Cockle voices Geralt in The Witcher video games, and was ecstatic to be voicing him for Netflix: “I was thrilled to be asked. I didn’t expect to be. So when I was asked, I was like, ‘this is fantastic.’ I love playing Geralt, I’ve been voicing Geralt since 2005, and I love him, it was an instant yes.”
The film follows Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter, who is hired to investigate a series of attacks in a seaside village. He soon finds himself drawn into a centuries-old conflict between humans and merpeople. He must count on friends, old and new, to solve the mystery before the hostilities between the two kingdoms escalate into all-out war.
“For me, a great challenge in doing this [film] was actually learning how to speak Merspeak. Trying to speak Merspeak which is a very musical language as Geralt of Rivia was really hard,” he tells us.
Cockle adds, “I love languages. I don’t speak any other fluently but I have dabbled in Turkish, I speak a bit of German, a bit of Spanish, I’ve tried a bit of French and I love how languages work. Geralt, in the games, there’s a couple of times he speaks Elvish, but not much. So, in this [film] I had to speak whole sentences and have whole conversations in Merspeak, and I found it fascinating.”
Watch the full conversation with Doug Cockle below.
The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep is streaming on Netflix.
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