Liam Hemsworth Deepfake Video Has Witcher Fans Divided, but We're Here for It
The Witcher TV series is currently in trouble due to replacement of its lead actor.
Henry Cavill is leaving the series after Season 3, as a result of his creative differences with the showrunners. Liam Hemsworth has been picked as his replacement, but reaction of the fans had been largely – and predictably – negative.
Some of the more open-minded fans have already tried to imagine what the series would look like with Hemsworth instead of Cavill in the role of Geralt of Rivia.
And one of them, a YouTuber known as stryder HD, decided to employ DeepFake, as the means of supplementing his imagination. He created sort of a pseudo concept trailer, named Season 4 – First Look, using DeepFake technology to place Hemsworth's likeness over footage of Cavill from earlier seasons of the show:
While technically the result is pretty stunning, yet another testament to the power of modern CG technologies, it was definitely not enough to make the rest of the fans come to terms with the actor replacement.
Case in point, the most popular YouTube comments for that video currently are "I want Cavill back already even before he's completely gone" and "Even with the side by side comparison I find my eyes are drawn to Henry's side."
Such attitudes are not unexpected.
While long-running or repeatedly-revived film franchises inevitably do change actors over time, few TV series, which aren't Dr. Who, had survived a change of their leads. Add to that the fact that Cavill is simply a more popular and better-known actor than Hemsworth.
More suited for the role of Geralt too. As is immediately obvious upon watching this very video, yes Hemsworth resembles Cavill, but he's too much of a pretty boy (we shall see if that can be fixed with makeup).
Add to that also the fact that Cavill is well-known a fan of The Witcher book and video games and, as far as we can tell, the above-mentioned creative differences boiled down to him demanding more respect for the source material. And the future of The Witcher on TV look ever grimmer. The Witcher: Blood Origin spin-off mini-series ending up being embarrassingly bad also does not instill optimism about the new seasons of the main series.