Doug Cockle is your favorite Geralt’s favorite Geralt. He’s been Mr. Rivia’s voice in all three of CD Projekt Red’s Witcher games and some spinoffs, becoming iconic enough through the trilogy that when Netflix’s first live action show was getting ready to air, then star Henry Cavill said he’d accidentally imitated Cockle’s version of Geralt instead of his own voice while filming a scene and it just kind of stuck.
Now Cockle is back in the saddle, taking Geralt’s voice out for a ride in Netflix’s animated feature length film The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep which premiered today on the streaming platform. I got the chance to interview Cockle last week ahead of the premiere and asked him if he feels at all like a legend riding back into town—to which he modestly demurred—but hearing his voice in a new project, this time beside some of the other live action cast like Joey Batey (Jaskier) and Anya Chalotra (Yennefer) does feel that way to me.
“It’s always lovely to step back into Geralt’s shoes,” Cockle says, referencing the various spinoffs (like Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales) and smaller projects he’s done as Geralt since the launch of The Witcher 3’s final expansion Blood and Wine in 2016.
“I describe it as—no pun intended—but it is like slipping into a warm bath,” though I think there’s a good chance he might have in fact premeditated and intended that pun, just saying.
“This was a really nice project to be a part of because it was a little bit different,” Cockle said of returning to do an animated film.
“One of the challenges was that they wanted the anime Geralt to be more vocal, basically. So I had to take Geralt to some places vocally that I hadn’t been asked to take him before. I remember at one point the vocal director saying ‘can you just project that a little bit more?’ and I said ‘Geralt doesn’t yell!'” Cockle said, laughing a little at his own lament. “I did my best Geralt yell and we’ll let the audience decide.”
“The voice is a muscle so like any athlete who trains, and trains their muscle to do certain things spectacularly—not that I’m saying I’m spectacular—the voice is like that—” here Cockle slips into seamless Geralt-level gravel “—so now Geralt really is just part of my voice and I just fall right into it. Sometimes while I’m washing the dishes.” He proceeds to do an impression of Geralt saying “Oh man I think I need to bleach this cup.”
“He’s part of me now, he’s part of my vocal range,” Cockle says.
Funnily enough, Geralt’s voice is a bit like an accent that Cockle just sort of drops into. The longer he talks about Geralt, the more he slides slowly into the register, deeper than his natural speaking voice, and eventually I’m nearly just interviewing Geralt of Rivia—a talkative and friendly Geralt of Rivia.
Sirens of the Deep premieres streaming on Netflix today as a 90 minute animated film, a spinoff adventure for Geralt and Jaskier based on one of Andrzej Sapkowski’s short stories.