![]() The nudity was also a steep learning curve. Maybe I got that completely wrong, which just goes to show.” I said to my agent on the phone: ‘I don’t think I’m right for this part.’ it helped me just play the scene rather than what I thought she was. And when she read that Yennefer’s defining quality was beauty – that “men wanted her, women wanted to be her” – she concluded she hadn’t a chance. Chalotra hadn’t even watched Game of Thrones, the show that turned fantasy mainstream. She was not au fait with the source material. Afterwards, she bounced between small parts before her agent put her up for The Witcher. So she studied acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, alma mater to, among others, Jodie Whittaker, Ewan McGregor and Dominic West, and where Cusack is a mentor. Thoroughly un-showbizzy, her parents were keen for her to get a qualification. She’d grown up in suburban Wolverhampton, the daughter of an Indian father and English mother, her passion for acting prompted by a performance of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice that she attended as a teenager. ![]() Don’t think about what you need to achieve with your character’s storyline through the whole season.’ Which helped.”Ĭhalotra was slightly wide-eyed when she went for her Witcher audition. She said to me, ‘Play the moment, play the scene. I had to figure out what my process was quite quickly.” Feeling the walls close in, she called an old confidante, Heartbeat and Virtues star Niamh Cusack. I couldn’t understand this way of working. It was all too much – the pace of filming compounded by the fact that scenes were shot out of chronological order. I haven’t worked with a black box in front of my face, despite having come out of drama school and calling myself an actor.” ![]() “I didn’t think I was going to get through the first day of filming,’ she says, recalling day one on set in Budapest. it’s made the on-screen monster-slaying look like a walk in the park.Ĭouple that with the sheer scale of the thing – vast battle scenes, dozens of extras, a budget of $10 million an episode – and 26-year-old leading lady Anya Chalotra, who stars as mercurial sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg in what is essentially her first big job after leaving drama school, was overwhelmed from the off. Fallings out between showrunners and stars, fan uproar over liberties with source material, enough sex to make even Daenerys Targaryen blush. And Netflix’s smash hit saga The Witcher, which fills the gap where Game of Thrones should be and returns for its third series this week, has been embroiled in more hoo-ha than most. It’s no picnic being part of the biggest fantasy series in town. ![]()
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