Yahoo News Even Minnie Driver is surprised she's in The Witcher: Blood Origin
An unknown account logs into a virtual Zoom waiting room set up by Netflix on a Tuesday afternoon in early December. Video is turned off. It's just a black screen with a name that sounds like some kid threw it together as a gag, complete with misspelling: "Person That Is Way Gooder Better Thab You." The account holder unmutes themself and a familiar voice is heard on the other end.
"Hello, hello. Minnie here," says Minnie Driver, the Oscar-nominated actress of Good Will Hunting who's here to talk about her role in event series The Witcher: Blood Origin and the larger Witcher universe.
I commend her Zoom handle. She doesn't know what I'm talking about until she looks more closely at her screen. "Oh my God. That's my son," Driver, 52, says, followed by a nervous laugh. Apparently, he does this kind of thing a lot. "You know what he did? Oh my God. On another Zoom account I have, he wrote, 'Person In the Top Right Box, You Are Boring,'" she says. "The fact that I haven't changed it, it's like, I don't wanna change the answering machine from when he was 4 that he did for me. I still have that. Even the things that I realize now are slowly rude, I still can't change them because they're him when he was being naughty, which I think is hilarious."
Driver has finally become a superstar in her now-14-year-old son Henry's eyes. He's known about his mom's work across stage and screen, and that she's amassed wide acclaim for that work, but he's only cared about two of her jobs. The first was voicing Lady Eboshi among the English-language voice cast of 1997's Princess Mononoke. "All his friends got into anime around the same time and they all lost their mind that I was in a Miyazaki movie," Driver says.
The second one is for The Witcher: Blood Origin, the four-episode prequel series to The Witcher premiering Christmas Day. The actress will debut as Seanchaí, a shapeshifting storyteller who can travel across worlds and time, before appearing elsewhere in the Witcher franchise. Henry and his friends are devouring all the Witcher entertainment. "It's pretty hard to silence teenagers, and I think all his friends are all like, 'What?! Wow!'" Driver remarks.
Netflix Minnie Driver appears in 'The Witcher: Blood Origin' as Seanchaí, a shapeshifting storyteller.
She can't quite believe it herself. Most people might not know this about the actress from Will and Grace, The Phantom of the Opera, and Circle of Friends, but Driver calls herself "a proper fan of The Witcher."
"I love fantasy and I love The Witcher, so it was a very cool call to get," she says. "Season 1, for me, really was like perfect television. I then got incredibly busy and I've only sporadically watched since, but I was devoted for that first season."
"She was at the top of our list when we came up with this role," shares Declan De Barra, the creator and showrunner of The Witcher: Blood Origin.
"They explained [Seanchaí] and I was like, 'Alright, so I'm not in every episode.' It's less cool, but still that's more a them problem than a me problem," the actress jokes, laughing. "But I really like the character. Who wouldn't want to be a shapeshifting elf? You've got to be pretty hardhearted not to want to do that."
As Seanchaí, Driver becomes a narrator for The Witcher: Blood Origin. The shapeshifter appears before Jaskier — Joey Batey reprising the role from the main series — in need of a bard to sing life back into the story of the Conjunction of the Spheres that brought humans and monsters into the world of the elves thousands of years earlier.
Seanchaí's voice can be heard telling the tale throughout the course of the four episodes, but she only appears in the beginning and the end of Blood Origin. Her scenes were shot in Oxfordshire over a few days, always during magic hour. Driver recalls carpets of bluebell flowers covering the filming location as the crew fabricated wintry effects with snow machines. "You have this juxtaposition of spring and snow and a kind of timeless quality. It was gorgeous," she says.
It appears, though, that the producers have larger plans in mind for Seanchaí. Driver says there have been "speculatory conversations" about the character's future. "I think the writers at Netflix are very smart. Like, why not create a character who is functional within the broader universe that you could drop down to further story in a really interesting and exciting way?" she says. "I would love to do that, actually. I would need the braids to hide my ears so I don't have to sit and get my [elf] ears on for two-and-a-half hours every day."
Despite the prosthetics and makeup routine, Drive finds Seanchaí is everything she dreamed of being as a child imagining herself in fantastical realms. "The shapeshifting aspect is really fantastic. It gives so much power to the character because you know that they can really appear in any form that they choose," she muses. "But also, I love the fact that this is an ancient storyteller. That's all actors really are. We're playing dress-up while storytelling, and there's something very satisfying about how familiar that is."
Perhaps Driver's future in The Witcher could involve sharing the screen with actor Henry Cavill, with whom she has a history — her brother went to school with Cavill. "I've known Henry since he was a teenager. I love him," she says. "He has been the loveliest person, I can attest, since he was a young man. He is divine." Driver hasn't yet had the opportunity to speak with Cavill about her Witcher role, but imagines that conversation will take place at their next meeting.
Cavill only has one season left of The Witcher, returning in summer 2023, to play Geralt of Rivia before the part is recast with Liam Hemsworth. One of her teenage son's friends asked Driver about the shake-up recently. The recasting has caused an upset in the fandom, but Driver offered this kid a different take.
"We come from this tradition of Doctor Who where the Doctor regenerates. I think we need to look at it far more like it's amazing," she says. "It's an amazing person, it's an amazing character, and we should have different people playing it. So that was a really cool conversation with a teenager. He was like, 'I never thought about it like that.'"
Driver responded to him with the kind of modest and lighthearted sarcasm she has exuded since talking about her son's Zoom shenanigans: "I was like, 'Good, you should talk to me more often. I'm cool.'"
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