Anya Chalotra plays wanting. Her Yennefer in The Witcher begins as a girl sold for less than a pig and never stops reaching, and in a series that kept losing its way she was the one performance with a real appetite.
Fi1m perspective
Find Yennefer of Vengerberg in the first episodes of The Witcher (2019), before the series has decided what she is. She is a hunched girl under prosthetics, sold to a school of sorceresses for less than a pig, and Anya Chalotra plays her with her chin down and her eyes up. The eyes are already asking for more than anyone in that room will give her. That look is the whole performance. The corsetry and the magic come later, and the grown woman who wears them is the same girl standing straighter.
She had done almost nothing on screen before it. A foundation year at LAMDA, three years at Guildhall, a professional debut as Hero in Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare's Globe in 2017, then small parts in Wanderlust and The ABC Murders (both 2018) and the call to Vengerberg the same year. The series ran five seasons and she finished filming the last of them in late 2025. She has said of it, "This character’s in me and I’ve let her go." That is a long apprenticeship to serve in public, with Lauren Schmidt Hissrich writing every season and a great many people watching.
Our view of the series is cooler than our view of her in it. Henry Cavill's Geralt was the thing that worked, and the seasons after the first grew the map and lost the man. Yennefer was the exception. We called hers the only wanting in the series with real hunger in it, and we stand by that: when the plot forgot what it was for, her scenes still had someone in them who needed something. We were moved by that early girl more than by most of what the series later built around her, because Chalotra keeps the wanting in the voice, low and level and never quite satisfied, long after the face has been fixed. She has said she showed a great deal of herself in that first season and was not entirely happy with it on viewing. We would not go that far. It is raw in places, and rawness is not the same as control, but the exposure is the point.
The stage has kept her honest. Between seasons she went back to it as Zula in Cold War at the Almeida (2023–24), a part that asks her to sing as well as act. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it from a distance; we note only that she chose it, and that the lead in a large fantasy series does not have to. Voice work in Creature Commandos and Twilight of the Gods (both 2024) fills the gaps.
What she does next will tell us whether the hunger was Yennefer's or hers. We suspect hers. We would buy a theatre ticket to find out.
Biography
Anya Chalotra is an English actress. She was born in Wolverhampton and attended St Dominic's Grammar School in Brewood before training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Chalotra made her professional stage debut in Much Ado About Nothing (2017) at Shakespeare's Globe. Her screen roles include Jennifer Ashman in the BBC series Wanderlust (2018) and Lily Marbury in The ABC Murders (2018). She is known for portraying Yennefer of Vengerberg in the Netflix series The Witcher (2019–present) and has provided voice work for Sherwood (2019), Twilight of the Gods (2024) and Creature Commandos (2024).
