It seems hard to conceive now, given we’ve had three games (and some assorted DLC) with Doug Cockle’s dulcet tones behind the deadpan features of Geralt of Rivia, but there was a time where CDPR was struggling to find out what everyone’s favourite witcher would sound like in The Witcher trilogy.
The Witcher 3 at 10
To celebrate its 10th anniversary, all this week we’re looking back on The Witcher 3—and looking ahead to its upcoming sequel, too. Keep checking back for more features and retrospectives, as well as in-depth interviews with the developers who brought the game to life.
Speaking to English adaptation director Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens assumed that Cockle might’ve been the obvious choice—a notion Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz was quick to dispel: “Not by any means was he the obvious choice, no.
“I don’t know if you know how Geralt of Rivia’s voice is described by Sapkowski in the books, but it’s essentially described as something along the lines of ‘harsh, metallic, almost inhuman’ and so on … To try to find somebody with a vocal quality that would answer all of those qualities, wasn’t really our thing from the outset.”
Turns out, while adjectives like harsh, metallic, and almost inhuman make for an evocative description when your imagination’s doing all the work, it’s a bloomin’ hard thing to base a voice casting off: “It’s not something that you can do if you want gamers to identify with a character.”
So what did the studio want for Geralt? “A badass voice.” That’s a little easier to narrow down, though “There were some negotiations between us and the marketing department of our North American publisher as to what the nature of the voice should be, what the accent of the voice should be.”
After whittling down a list of around two-dozen voices from the studio they were working with, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz says they’d narrowed it to five candidates. “We went through that short list of five on a conference call,” he adds, before revealing that: “There were some who would have preferred him to have sort of a Texan accent, because that was what they thought of as ‘badass’.”
While I openly and dearly grieve for an alternate universe in which Geralt was a rootin’ tootin’ wild west ranger (thus making Henry Cavil do a similar twang in the live-action adaptation) I can’t say CDPR made the wrong choice.
“In the studio we were of the opinion that what we wanted was, yes, a badass, but something of an everyman. Which, to me, meant (and because of the importance of the North American market) we would go with an American accent, but a standard American.
“Geralt is the straight everyman to everybody else around him … What Doug did in reading the casting sign for the voice was [just that]. He was a badass everyman who would be a foil to all of the emoting going on around him in that world. There is an underlying warmth to his timbre and his tone, which is a little bit counter to the idea of a hard-boiled hero, or anti-hero, in this case, but yeah—Doug was the best at being normal.”
Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz explains, though, that Cockle’s voice acting wasn’t locked in fully until the second game, where they were able to gain a “more established” studio. “I remember actually having a couple of conversations with Doug over the phone between the Witcher 1 and Witcher 2, and he was kind of surprised that he was going to have to audition for it again.”
Still, “they had their own casting department, and they had their own casting ideas. The recasting that we did for the Witcher 2, it wasn’t a thing where we just wanted to cast off the past … It was just a new opening for us.” Despite all that, though, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz notes that “Once again, for very similar reasons, Doug won out.” And the rest is gravelly, deliciously-textured history—well, not quite history, since we’ll be seeing Geralt again in The Witcher 4.
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