The most famous supporter of Warhammer 40,000 is actor and celebrity nerd Henry Cavill. As a confessing player and fan, he has often talked about the hobby and will soon star in a series about the franchise on Amazon. In a new post on Instagram, there are now hints about who exactly Cavill will play, focusing only on an injured leg.
Here’s what Cavill shows:
- During the preparations for the remake of Highlander, Henry Cavill injured his leg in early September.
- As a brief status update, the star posted on Instagram two pictures. One shows Cavill with his dog, the other his leg in a cast on a pillow.
- Instead of a short explanation, there is an old English poem to read. Together with a few details in the pictures for some experts, this provides clear hints about the upcoming series on Warhammer 40,000 on Amazon.
What are the hints about the series? Very evidently in the picture with the injured leg, some books about the Horus Heresy are visible, the latest version of Warhammer 40,000 with even larger, wacky models.
Henry Cavill is a big fan of Warhammer, so the presence of the books there is not necessarily surprising. However, the website IGN sees it as more than just a few randomly scattered fan items.
Amazon is currently planning a new series on Warhammer and Henry Cavill will play the lead role. Not much is known yet. The books are said to hint at when the series will take place – during the time of the Great Crusade, 10,000 years before Warhammer 40,000.
The second hint is an item in the background, behind Cavill’s dog. There is a Leviathan box set, in which you get starter armies for the Ultramarines and the Tyranids to play directly.
According to IGN, this is also not a coincidence: Ultramarines versus Tyranids is the premise for Space Marine 2, the latest game in Warhammer 40,000, which Cavill has already praised. From here, it gets a bit more complicated.
In the latest series on Warhammer, it is not about Space Marines, but about nasty rats and demigods:
A poem as a hint at Cavill’s role
Ultramarines and Tyranids have a long history. The first known invasion of Tyranids into the Imperium in Warhammer 40,000 occurred at Macragge, the home world of the Ultramarines, where the bug aliens could only be repelled at great losses by the Space Marines.
IGN sees this as a hint at the storyline that the series should have – reinforced by the poem that Cavill posts. It is “Invictus” by British writer William Ernest Henley.
Henley wrote the poem in 1875, after a leg had to be amputated due to an illness caused by tuberculosis at a young age, while recovering from an injury on the other leg, similar to Cavill now.
Are you still following along? Good, because now comes the really big leap in the considerations.
“Invictus” is also the name of a well-known Space Marine: Saul Invictus, a Captain of the Ultramarines, who was killed during the battle for Macragge. IGN now suspects that Cavill’s role in the Warhammer series will be that of Saul Invictus during the invasion of the Tyranid fleet Behemoth on Macragge.
Of course, all of this could also simply be coincidence, and Cavill was just preparing for a friendly game with his new army against an acquaintance during his recovery phase. Then again, we are talking about the man who unrecognized showed strangers the way to the subway: Henry Cavill once stood in the middle of New York to see if he was recognized as Superman
