English singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is not allowed in Netflix’s Witcher, at least not in his capacity as a musician. The author of the Witcher series of novels, Andrzej Sapkowski, says he will ensure that the red-haired crooner does not make an appearance in the Netflix series as he did in the seventh season of Game of Thrones.
“I believe that my job as a creative consultant for this series is to make sure that at no point in the show [will] Ed Sheeran sing,” Sapkowski said at Warsaw Comic Con, as reported by Comic Book. “And that I will make sure doesn’t happen. I will make sure.”
Sapkowski was, to be clear, just having a bit of fun at the expense of Game of Thrones and Sheeran, and the comments are only now turning up in the English press more than a year after Sapkowski made them. It’s not clear that we were ever in any danger of seeing a Sheeran cameo in The Witcher, but the show has occasionally been compared to HBO’s Game of Thrones, and Sapkowski felt there was at least some need to draw a distinction.
Game of Thrones fans weren’t pleased with the Sheeran cameo in their show, during which he sang a song called “Hands of Gold,” which originally appeared in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels.
There’s plenty of music in The Witcher, of course, but most of that comes from the bard Jaskier (or as he’s called in the games, Dandelion). And the show really only needs one mildly annoying bard character, right?
Speaking of Dandelion, you can download a mod if you’d like to see him perform ‘Toss A Coin To Your Witcher’ in the original Witcher game, and the song has also been stirringly covered by a Russian choir.