Henry Cavill Explains His Career-Threatening Muscle Injury In New Video
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Featured Image Credit: Netflix, Henry Cavill via Instagram
The Witcher star Henry Cavill has shed a little light on the leg injury he sustained while filming the second season of the show, and it sounds like it was an extremely close shave for the actor.
Some context for you - he pulled his hamstring while sprinting across an assault course in December, and the injury was so severe that he had to take a break from work in order to ensure he was in tip-top condition again. Cavill loves the original series of books and the game, so when he bagged the role of the bounty hunter, he wanted to embody Geralt of Rivia in the literal definition of the word. "It's very important to me that when you see Geralt on screen that you know it's Geralt," he said at Comic-Con 2019. "And that it's not 'some guy' that can do the Geralt stuff and I'm just the actor. For me, the character involves all of that."
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Healing the injury involved waking up in the wee hours of the morning to fit in the physiotherapy that would bring strength back to his leg, but in this chatty video posted to Instagram, we learned that Cavill could have been in dire straits due to the gravity of his injury. "It turned out to be a Grade 2B tear," he explained, which I'm sure will make any health professionals who are reading this wince in sympathy. "My physiotherapist told me that if the tear was any more severe, it would have been a rupture, and that means that the tendon and the muscle leave the bone, which would have been really rather nasty."
I'll say. He also added an MRI image of his hamstrings, where one has a bright white streak within the muscle, and that is internal bleeding. The pain he must have felt in the moment would have been off the charts, and it's weird to think that Cavill got off lightly. If the tendon had been pulled off the bone, the recovery time for such a serious injury would have turned into months and months because the leg must be immobilised for proper healing and it might have needed surgery too. Later on in the video, the actor showed off the protein powder he uses in his blueberry shakes to help the rehabilitation process he's undergoing, and said that his physiotherapist has him do electrotherapy sessions to inspect the condition of the muscles in both legs.
"You don't need to see [that], because that's essentially lying in my underpants and that is not very cinematic," he joked. The second season of The Witcher wrapped earlier this month, and though a release window has not been announced, we're extremely excited to return to the Continent and pick up where Geralt, Yen, and Ciri left off.
Topics: News, The Witcher
