Rise to Fame
The original audition was for Marilka, a minor character with no real arc. Over 200 young women across Europe were competing for Ciri, The Witcher's actual lead. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich flew to London after seeing her on tape, had her recast, and she found out the day before her birthday. The show premiered in December 2019 and became one of Netflix's biggest fantasy hits. She'd been cold-emailing agents since she was 14. The audition room wanted a minor character. She got the whole show.
In the Spotlight
The Witcher's fourth season is the first without Henry Cavill, which makes it either a crisis or an opportunity. She's treating it as the latter. Ciri's look in Season 4 draws more heavily from the video games, and she was involved in shaping it. Outside the franchise, she played Mae in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) and earned a Saturn Award nomination for it. A Marianne Faithfull biopic is in development with her attached as the lead. She has said she wants an A24 film. Everything outside Netflix reads as deliberate distance from the franchise.
Side Notes
At four years old, she refused to play the wolf in her school nativity because wolves were the bad guys. She negotiated the role into a vegetarian wolf instead. She grew up moving between Australia, the French Pyrenees (French-language school), and Oxford, and attended Headington School, same as Emma Watson. By 11 she was touring in a ballet production of Rapunzel. At 14, she started cold-contacting agents on her own. The vegetarian wolf was the first audition she refused to lose.