Fourth Wing Cast Its Violet and Xaden. Fans Are Divided.
Esther McGregor and Emilio Sakraya are Prime Video's Violet and Xaden in Fourth Wing. Readers of the Rebecca Yarros novel are not uniformly pleased about it.
Credit Deadline, Tyla, Variety, Wikipedia (Esther McGregor), Wikipedia (Emilio Sakraya), Wikipedia (Fourth Wing)
For three years, readers of Fourth Wing have been casting the film in their heads. On Thursday they found out they were wrong.
Deadline reported on 15 October that Prime Video's adaptation of Rebecca Yarros's novel has found its two leads: Esther McGregor will play Violet Sorrengail and Emilio Sakraya will play Xaden Riorson. Sakraya's name was trending in the United States after the news.
Worth noting at the outset: this came through Deadline's sources rather than through an official announcement, and Amazon had not publicly commented at the time of writing.
Who they cast
Emilio Sakraya is 30, born in Berlin to Meryem Moutaoukkil, a Moroccan-German actress, and a Serbian father. He has been working since he was nine, when he appeared in a commercial, and he trained in martial arts alongside acting. English-language audiences know him from Warrior Nun and Those About to Die; German audiences know him from Rhinegold and Tribes of Europa. He is also a singer, releasing music simply as Emilio.
He is also, and this is part of what explains the reaction, a name some fans had already picked for Xaden, as the reactions below show.
Esther McGregor is 24, born in London on 22 October 2001, which makes her 25 next week. She started modelling at 16, with a first job alongside her older sister Clara, and has since worked for Fendi, Stella McCartney, Miu Miu and Celine, with Miuccia Prada personally picking her to open a spring/summer show in Milan.
Her acting credits are more substantial than the "newcomer" framing suggests. She had a cameo in Obi-Wan Kenobi in 2022 and a run on the series High School the same year. She was in Babygirl and The Room Next Door in 2024. She was one of the main cast of Prime Video's We Were Liars as Mirren Sinclair Sheffield, alongside Joseph Zada, which is the credit most relevant here because Prime Video has worked with her before. In June she was cast as Rachel Amber in the Life Is Strange adaptation, and she co-stars with Zach Braff in this year's Clean Hands.
She also runs a tattoo shop in New York called Pink Ether and had a band during lockdown called French Thyme. She is, by any reading, busy.
Since it is among the first things Google suggests when you type her name: her father is Ewan McGregor and her mother is the production designer Eve Mavrakis. Her great-uncle Denis Lawson is an actor too. She has said publicly that her parents never let her do anything onscreen until she was old enough to make the decision herself.
Why the fandom split
The arguments are not really about acting, because nobody has seen either of them in these roles. They are about a mismatch between a photograph and a picture people have been carrying for three years.
Violet Sorrengail, in the books, is physically fragile and consistently underestimated, which is the engine of the whole story. Readers have very fixed ideas about what that looks like. Some of the objections circulating this week are about height, with fans comparing the two leads' reported statures against what they imagine the characters' difference should be. Height is also among the first things Google suggests when you type her name.
The reactions, as collected by Tyla, run the full range. On the positive side: "HE WAS ALWAYS MY WINGLEADER OF CHOICE!!!!", "THIS IS PERFECTION," and from one reader, that Sakraya had been fan-cast so often he was already Xaden in their head. On the other side: "Actually devastated by this. He was never my Xaden," and, about McGregor, "that's NOT Violet. I won't be watching."
And then the sensible middle, which usually gets drowned out: that this is not how somebody pictured the characters but that can change once you see them in costume and in character, and, from one reader with more patience than most, that you cannot judge whether someone fits a character from a single still photograph in an article.
That last point is worth keeping in mind. Every adaptation casting goes through this.
Fans had also expected other names. According to Tyla, Inde Navarrette was reportedly the main name considered for Violet, and Josh Heuston was a leading fan pick for Xaden.
Where the production actually stands
Amazon MGM Studios has been developing a television adaptation of The Empyrean, Yarros's series, since 2023. The series order came in May this year.
Meredith Averill is the showrunner. Her previous work includes Wednesday and Anne with an E. Lisa Joy is directing the series premiere.
No release date has been announced, and no start of filming has been announced.
What to expect next
The questions people are asking, beyond the cast, are the release date and the rest of the characters. Neither has been answered yet. Given how this week went, each further casting announcement is likely to produce its own round of this.
For now there are two names, no official announcement, and a very large number of people with strong opinions about a show that has no release date.
