Doug Cockle’s career came “completely out of the blue.”
The voice of Geralt in CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher saga trained as an actor primarily for theater, but also took roles in movies and TV series. “Building a career primarily around voicing game characters was something that wasn’t even on my radar,” Cockle told Polygon in a video interview. However, that’s exactly what he did starting with 2001’s Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos, his first foray into video game voice acting.
Cockle has had many roles in the 25 years since, but none are as renowned as his work as the Witcher Geralt, a character he’s played for about 20 years, and will return to for The Witcher 4. But his time as Geralt hasn’t been perfect. In fact, it was almost cut short a decade and a half ago between the first and second games. “I’m just glad they decided to keep me on the journey because it’s been such a great journey.”
The Witcher — “It was just truly the wild west”
Cockle’s time as Geralt began with 2007’s The Witcher. He joined CD Projekt Red’s RPG like he would most any other role: with a successful audition. In that audition, he created what would become Geralt’s voice.
“He was described to me as this grizzled kind of anti-hero who doesn’t have much of a sense of humor and does this job that’s really, really deadly, and he gets treated really poorly for it,” Cockle said. At some point in the audition, someone suggested Cockle think of Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies as inspiration. “You can kind of hear it [in Geralt]. The whole, ‘Go ahead, punk, make my day.’”
Cockle knew the game was based on a book series, but it hadn’t been translated into English yet. He had to rely on the knowledge of the CDPR developers who were there for his recording sessions to help inform his performance: “They had concept art for Geralt, for some of the creatures in the world, and for Tris and Yen and various other characters, but that’s all I had to go on.”
Once Cockle was familiar with the character and had Geralt’s voice locked down, the next challenge was maintaining it for a whole recording session. Nowadays, there are guidelines for the maximum amount of time an actor can record to protect their voice, which is typically four hours. That wasn’t the case when Cockle was recording The Witcher in the mid-2000s. His days could be eight or even 10 hours long.
“Felt like 18 hours,” he joked. Cockle already has a deep voice, but Geralt’s is even lower in his register. “At the end of each recording day, my voice was wrecked and I would go back to my hotel room and I’d just sip on peppermint tea and not talk at all.”
His days were so long because, if his memory serves him right, he recorded almost all of The Witcher in one week. “There were no guidelines. It was just truly the wild west,” Cockle said. “So we just went for it and, boy, we did.”
The Witcher 2 — “I thought they hated my performance”
The Witcher was released in 2007, and CD Projekt Red announced its sequel in 2010. As Cockle later learned, CDPR wanted to “push the envelope” with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, and created the proprietary REDengine to do just that. Cockle was eventually told that the studio wanted to change how it told stories and developed characters and, in a way, began The Witcher 2 with a clean slate.
In terms of the game’s voice cast, Cockle said, “there were very few people who went through from Witcher to then perform again in Witcher 2.” Cockle was one of the few to reprise his role, but that almost wasn’t the case.
“During the entire time I was recording the Witcher games, I was also teaching acting at a university here [in England],” Cockle said. At some point between games, he was sitting at his desk going through emails, as he always would. He got a text from a friend saying he had just auditioned for Geralt of Rivia for The Witcher 2. “‘I thought that was you,’” his friend wrote.
“I thought they hated my performance. I must have done something awful. […] Or I mean, maybe I spat in someone’s eye and didn’t know it,” Cockle said. “Who knows, but obviously they’re casting for Geralt again.”
After Cockle stopped “feeling sorry for myself,” he reached out to Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz at CDPR, who was a writer on the first two games and later the English adaptation director for the third. Cockle said he had heard that CDPR was casting for The Witcher 2, and that he’d love to be considered for the role again. It didn’t take long for Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz to tell Cockle they’d have him back.
The Witcher 3 — “I experienced a maturation in the team across the board”
The Witcher 2 was released in 2011 and was a success, garnering a positive reception, like its predecessor, and selling well. Of course, CD Projekt Red didn’t stop there — The Witcher 3: WIld Hunt was on the horizon.
Between the second and third entries, Cockle said he noticed a change among the team at CDPR. “The major shift I felt was in terms of the maturity of the team’s understanding of the world and the characters within it,” he said, pointing to the depth of the writing in The Witcher 3 as an example of how the team grew. “I experienced a maturation in the team across the board, actors included and directors, in the telling of the stories. And that’s a great thing to be a part of. That’s magical.”
What’s truly magical is just how successful The Witcher 3 became after its launch in 2015. It sold six million copies in six weeks and won numerous end-of-year awards. (And has now sold over 65 million copies, making it the eighth best-selling game of all time.)
Cockle was as surprised as anybody by The Witcher 3’s explosion in popularity. “I hadn’t a clue [it would happen],” Cockle said. He was still teaching full-time, managing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of budgets, and overseeing a staff of 20 or so employees. “I was a busy boy.”
When recording The Witcher, Cockle said stepping into the booth “was a real joy” because it allowed him a few hours of escape from “putting out fires” at his day job. “For the next four hours, my job is to do this one thing and do it as well as I possibly can,” he said.
It took Cockle about six months and several students saying to him, “‘Doug, you’re Geralt, aren’t you?’” for him to really clock the phenomenon that the game was becoming. Once journalists started visiting him for interviews and chatting with him at award shows, like the 2016 BAFTA Game Awards, there was no denying just how massive and special The Witcher 3 was.
The Future — “Any opportunity to step back into those lovely boots is a welcome opportunity”
Cockle isn’t done with Geralt, not by a longshot. In 2025, he joined Netflix’s Witcher canon by voicing Geralt for the animated film The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep. Next up is the recently announced The Witcher 3 expansion, Songs of the Past, but don’t expect him to share any details about it at the moment. “I know as much as you do based on the press releases that CDPR has put out,” he said.
He’ll also return for The Witcher 4, which finds Geralt taking a backseat to his adopted daughter Ciri, who will be the game’s protagonist. (To anyone taking issue with Ciri’s expanded role, Cockle has previously said to “read the damn books.”)
Cockle is appreciative of his time as Geralt and the outpouring of love from the series’ community, and he hopes to continue voicing the Witcher for as long as possible. “I think when I’m 90, if I’m able to play a character like Geralt, I will be absolutely over the moon,” he said. “Maybe there will be a Witcher 18 by that time and it’ll be Geralt in his dotage training young Witchers or something like that.”
“I want my voice to be Geralt forever and ever, ever, ever, but that’s me being selfish,” he said.
Don’t ask The Witcher’s creator about The Witcher 4
Andrej Sapkowski is waiting for everyone to grow up and discover books
