Freya Allan on Doing Her Own Stunts for Ciri’s ‘Witcher’ Ninja Warrior Scenes

Just like her badass character, Allan was absolutely eager to do her own stunts, with one caveat. “I basically said, ‘I will do whatever I can do without potentially hurting myself,’ because obviously, if you hurt yourself it affects the entire crew and you don’t want that to happen,” the actress says. “But I wanted to do as much as I possibly could … It was something I had looked forward to for ages, and it’s always so satisfying when you conquer a stunt and execute it.” Allan adds: “It was so much adrenaline and so nice to get a break from doing all of those really heavy scenes.”

Ciri’s training is also one of many examples of The Witcher‘s enhanced budget this year (Season 2 was rumored to be on par with Marvel’s robust productions). But Hissrich notes that due to travel restrictions from the pandemic, they had limited options when it came to sets and travel, which made making those snowy training scenes really special a particular challenge. “We had to stay on our home sets in London, and we’d made a couple of local trips, but it doesn’t look like that,” she says. “The obstacle course was shot on our backlot in the dead of summer. A lot of that structure existed through what our production team built, but all of the backdrop is VFX. In that sequence alone there are 123 VFX shots. It is the largest that we did.”