 He isn't absolutely adorable story for you. Have you ever wondered why Henry Cavill of all people got cast as Gerald of Rivia in Netflix's live-action adaptation of The Witcher? It's because he wanted it more than anyone else. Henry Cavill literally pestered the producers of the show from before they'd even started writing scripts to cast him in the lead role. Why? Because Henry Cavill loves The Witcher 3. Let's back up a bit. You might know Henry best as Superman, or as a man with an entirely CGI top lip, but first and foremost, he is a gamer. As a teenager, Henry loved PC games. He played his fair share of games like Delta Force and Half-Life, and he and his brothers would set up elaborate LAN parties with their computers atop his mother's dining table. As he got older, this obsession with gaming grew even stronger, if for somewhat sad reasons. After all, the paparazzi don't hound you when you're playing a video game. Said Henry, Every time I step out my front door, I'm hyper-aware. Even if I'm not looking terrible, you still realise there are people taking sneaky photos of you, because that's what people like to do. And then they put them on the internet, and you see them on Instagram. At home, I get to sit playing games for a ridiculous amount of hours and escape there. Because going outside has the opposite effect. One of Henry's favourite games to escape into is the Witcher 3 Wild Hunt. It's safe to say that Henry has devoured it. The full game is over a hundred hours long, and Henry has played it multiple times to completion, even playing on the hardest difficulty setting. So, when Henry heard that Netflix was making a live-action adaptation of the Witcher novels, he became really, really desperate to learn the lead role. Perhaps a little too desperate, said Henry. When I heard they were making the Witcher, I obviously was incredibly excited, and I annoyed the living daylights out of my agents. I called them every day and said, guys, now, meeting now? How about now? Henry's long-suffering agents had to point out that Netflix weren't casting yet. They had only barely chosen a showrunner. They weren't anywhere near choosing a lead actor. Still, Henry continued to annoy his agents, until finally they performed a miracle and got him a face-to-face interview with showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich. In Henry's own words, I think eventually Netflix just got tired and Lauren said, OK, we'll meet the guy. The meeting did not go the way Henry had hoped. He met with Lauren full of eagerness and enthusiasm, gushing about just how much he loves the Witcher games. In response, she essentially said no. They still weren't at the casting point yet, so could he please just stop hounding them? So Henry spent four months hoping and waiting. Waiting and hoping. Maybe today he'd get the phone call for an audition? Maybe now? Netflix had other plans that absolutely did not involve Henry Cavill. Lauren was busy interviewing pretty much anyone else she could find for the role, seeing over 200 actors read for the role and narrowing it down to her favourite few. But yet, as she was writing the script, she couldn't help but think of Henry. She started hearing his voice in her head as she wrote Gerald's dialogue. Oh, all right. Maybe they should at least get him in to read for the part. In Henry's words, they were right at the end of their casting process and they said to themselves, I'm sure, something along the lines of, let's bring Henry in and just hear him read. So Henry finally got the call. Could he be in New York tomorrow to audition for Gerald? At that moment, Henry was on holiday in Florida, but that wasn't going to stop him. After a sleepless night, he flew straight to New York for his audition, met with the now substantially larger creative team for the show, and somehow persuaded them to hire him. So when you see Henry as Gerald, bear in mind that he got that role through sheer dedication to the Witcher video games. He loves the Witcher 3, and he wants the whole world to know it. The moral of the story, apparently, is that you can achieve your dreams through being really, really annoying. If you hassle people enough, who knows? Maybe they'll give you what you want. Hmm, that doesn't seem like a good moral. On a completely unrelated note though, why don't you toss a coin to your Witcher and support someone's Patreon today? You might just be making their dreams come true. I feel like I should add a better moral to this story. Something positive about persistence and respecting boundaries when you're asked to back off, because he did. He waited a while and then got back to the good on him, I guess. To give him his due, he was very passionate about something, and it worked for him.