Henry Cavill has, for the past few years, been ramping up to work on a Warhammer 40k series with Amazon after departing his role as The Witcher's Geralt in the Netflix series. A move which caused no end of upset, given his enduring love for the source material—and, let's be honest, pretty solid Doug Cockle impression.
It took a minute but, late last year, Games Workshop and Amazon officially worked everything out to set Cavill to work in earnest. And, per a recent interview with Esquire, Cavill is pleased as punch about the fact he's in the producer's chair this time around.
If you clicked the link above, you might be wondering: 'Harvey, why is this interview about watches?' Which is sort of the point, really. The article centres around Cavill's newfound love of watchmaking—specifically, it claims, when he took a trip to the Swiss Alps with his brother.
Surrounded by breathtaking natural beauty and the company of family, Cavill's brain immediately drew a comparison between this rather lovely sounding experience watchmaking and Warhammer 40k: "What I was doing required finesse and concentration, and that was only one watch. It's more difficult than my level of painting Warhammer. But I felt comfortable, picking up small tools and tiny screws."
Bless him. This isn't meant as a slight. I reckon most of us at PCG have immediately drawn comparisons between what we're doing and, well, gaming of all stripes. I myself am more than guilty of viewing things through the lens of whatever TTRPG I'm obsessed with at the time.
Cavill, moreover, seems pleased as punch to be in the producer's chair this time around, describing it as a "dream come true, but it's different from what I've done before, in the sense I haven't had my hand on the tiller of things … It is a tricky IP, and a very complex IP, and that's what I love about it. The challenges that come with putting this on the page in a way that is doing justice to that complexity, that trickiness, and that nuance, is a challenge I'm enjoying enormously."
Cavill is a huge Warhammer-head. Even during his Witcher days, he couldn't stop thinking about the wargame. He's guest-starred in DLCs and, like most Warhammer fans, I imagine, spent most of the Covid-19 pandemic painting his mini collection.
A more cynical part of me wonders if this has something to do with Cavill finally getting a high-level say in how an adaptation comes about. Cavill's joked about being "effusive about being loyal to the source material" before, meanwhile The Witcher season 3 suffered from rumours of its writers "actively disliking" the books, though this was later rebuffed as a "mess of lies". On his way out, Cavill also noted that his co-stars brought depth and complexity to characters who were "often at risk of being over-simplified".
Whether that hints at a little bit of drama behind-the-scenes—or just the typical creative conversations you need to have while making an adaptation—is slightly more complicated, and I shan't throw more conjecture at it. I will, however, hazard a guess that Cavill's enough of a Warhammer 40k buff to be utterly delighted by being in the Emperor's—sorry, I mean director's—chair.
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