🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
Declan de Barra writes all his parts with an actor in mind, but when The Witcher: Blood Origin showrunner envisioned Michelle Yeoh playing the swordmaster Scían, he never imagined she’d actually agree to take the role.
“I was just the biggest fanboy of Michelle Yeoh since her Hong Kong days,” de Barra tells Tudum. “Then I’m on a phone call trying to convince her to do the show. She doesn’t need to do anything. She only does stuff she loves. She laughed a lot and she thought this would be something new for her.”
Scían is the last survivor of the Ghost Clan, a nomadic tribe that was mostly wiped out by the elven kingdom of Xin’trea. She served as the swordmother for Éile (Sophia Brown), teaching her how to fight to defend the rulers of the rival kingdom of Pryshia. When Éile’s own clan is betrayed and killed, she teams up with former Xin’trean royal bodyguard Fjall (Laurence O’Fuarain), her former master Scían and four other heroes in a quest for vengeance.
“Every single character, every one of the underdogs, the magnificent seven, brought something, whether it was love, whether it was sacrifice, whether it was redemption, or a wrong that they had to right,” Yeoh tells Tudum. “Everyone had a burden. Everyone had a story that had to be resolved.”
Yeoh worked to build chemistry with Brown by spending time together beyond the set.“It’s very easy when you work with someone as talented and engaged as Sophia,” Yeoh says. “We’d go for dinners together, so that’s the best time. When you share food, you eat and you drink together — that’s when you share the best, that’s when you bond, and that will carry through in the characters.”
De Barra says he was initially terrified to work with Yeoh, but she quickly put him at ease.
“What I didn’t realize about her is that she’s a big joker,” he says. “She comes up to Laurence and she goes, ‘Let me look at your ears. Huh, well, they won’t have to use any false ears for you,’ and then she walks off. She was constantly doing wonderful stuff like that or just pulling pranks. She was just a great, great person to have on set, and I’ll be forever thankful to her.”
That mix of humor and gravitas also helped Yeoh establish the mentor-student relationship between Scían and Éile.
“Being the older one in the family, it’s easy to be the more dominating one. It’s like, ‘Child, sit,’” Yeoh says. “We loved to tease Laurence together, so that makes it even easier.”
Early in the series, Scían fights both Fjall and Éile with just an empty scabbard while schooling them on their inadequacies as warriors. The star of Everything Everywhere All at Once and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was just as impressive to her co-stars.
“The cast would practice the stunts for weeks and weeks and weeks,” de Barra says. “They’d think they have it down, they’d take multiple takes and they’d get it and they’d be very happy. Then Michelle would come on and do one take and they’d go, ‘Oh, that’s how it’s done.’ People would gather to watch her do her takes, but you had to not blink because she nailed it in one go every time.”
Yeoh also helped shape her character’s dialogue to distinguish Scían from the younger heroes of Blood Origin.
“She said, ‘Scían wouldn’t swear. She’s more the mom who would look disapprovingly at you and make you feel terrible,’” de Barra says. “I went, ‘Oh yeah, absolutely. You’re totally right there.’”
Scían’s arc focuses on her efforts to recover her clan’s ancestral blade Soulreaver, which was taken as a trophy by Xin’trea. The first scene Yeoh shot for the series was Scían’s conclusion, where she brings the sword back to her ancestral lands.
“Being in Iceland was one of the best things that we did for Blood Origin, because it gave it the scope and the magnitude through the weather — the cold, the stark contrast of the black ice with the blue, blue skies or the green moss,” says Yeoh. “We were in a place where it was all black sands when we shot that scene. It was amazing. When we started to talk about Soulreaver, the winds just picked up. It’s almost like we had special effects without special effects.”
The Icelandic elements weren’t the only thing to move Yeoh — just reading the script brought her to tears. “It was tears of joy,” she explains. “I really loved that connection that [Soulreaver] had, that it wasn’t just a weapon of destruction, but a representation of family and history and culture.”
And the legendary actor initially had even greater ambitions for her character.
“I was hoping that Scían would be the [first prototype] Witcher, because she’s the wisest and the oldest, and more in control of her emotions than the two young ones, [Éile and Fjall],” Yeoh admits. “I guess for her own reasons, this was not her journey to be had. Fjall was probably the right one because he had that anger. That was very specific to Fjall, and I think it brought the Witcher, that monster side, much more forward.”
While Scían buries Soulreaver along with her fallen companions at the end of Blood Origin, her family continues to grow, as Éile is pregnant with Fjall’s child. Yeoh says Scían’s reaction to the news would be “rejoicing, and hoping it doesn’t come out as a monster. Then she’ll have the two best guys in her life. They will be there for her or him.”
Additional reporting by Ariana Romero
