CD Projekt 'hacked time and space' to cast Charles Dance in The Witcher 3, because they needed an announcement before the countdown on their website reached zero

On August 14, 2013, CD Projekt announced that veteran British actor and screenwriter Charles Dance (Dracula, Game of Thrones, The Crown) would be playing the ruthless Nilfgaardian Emperor Emhyr var Emreis—an impressive addition to The Witcher 3 cast and a role that fit Dance like a glove. At that time his character Tywin Lannister was a fan favourite for viewers of Game of Thrones, and hadn't yet been unceremoniously killed off while on the privy. Life was good.

The announcement contained a quote from Marcin Blacha, lead writer on The Witcher 3, expressing that it was a "dream come true for the team here at Red to be able to work with such an accomplished actor and magnetic personality." But according to CD Projekt's English adaptation director, Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, getting Dance on board was akin to diffusing a ticking time bomb.

In a new interview with PC Gamer, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz explained that they "didn't really have a strong notion that Emhyr should be a AAA talent. But there was a point during the development and promotion process when we put a countdown up on our website [...] saying that some important announcement was pending [...] and then we decided not to make the announcement."

Whatever that announcement was, they needed a replacement and fast. "The clock was running, and we had to [have] something to announce by the time the clock ran down to zero," Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz continued. "And I think it was somebody in marketing or biz dev who came up with the idea that we should just get a AAA actor [...] and when the clock runs down, announce them as the big reveal.

"It was one of our colleagues in biz dev who had a contact in [the] talent management world and it was, you know, a couple of emails, a couple of phone calls, who's available, what's good? What are the roles? Well, if it's going to be a AAA talent we want to have, we want [them] to have a significant role. Not necessarily in terms of scope, but in terms of meaning for the plot, or for the world and so on and so forth. And we ended up [settling on] Emhyr, in terms of [the role], and we ended up [casting] Charles Dance."

While the exact timeframe of the countdown is unclear, Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz estimates that "it might have been [...] a clock that was running down from 48 hours. Sometime within those 48 hours, those decisions, negotiations, and communications happened [...] It went quickly enough that we were actually able to announce Charles Dance's Emhyr var Emreis, by the time the clock ran down."

Regardless of the minute-by-minute specifics, the end result is that in an incredible feat of marketing-based engineering, a miracle happened: CD Projekt got its big announcement, and we got the devastating charm of Charles Dance. "I suppose we hacked time and space in that instance to make it look all intended and smooth," Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz laughed. I'd call that a win.