Prime Video's Fourth Wing has its Violet and its Xaden, at least according to the trades. Esther McGregor will play Violet Sorrengail, and Emilio Sakraya will take on Xaden Riorson, Deadline and Variety both reported on Thursday, citing sources close to the production.
Amazon declined to comment. Until the studio says something officially, the casting stays in "reportedly" territory.
Violet is the book's narrator and its center of gravity. She is twenty, small, physically fragile, and trained her whole life to be a scribe before her mother, a general, ordered her into the Riders Quadrant at Basgiath War College. The school has one rule, and it is not subtle: graduate or die.
Xaden is theingleader who makes her life harder and then complicated. Their enemies-to-lovers arc is the engine of Rebecca Yarros' novel, which is why this particular pairing drew more speculation than almost any other adaptation casting in recent memory.
McGregor is best known for playing Mirren Sinclair in Prime Video's We Were Liars. She also appeared in Babygirl. She is the daughter of Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, a detail British outlets noted quickly.
She is currently filming Prime Video's Life Is Strange, so her calendar is already crowded. How the two projects will line up is not something the reports address.
Sakraya's résumé is wider, and a good deal of it is European. He has credits in Rhinegold, Tribes of Europa, Warrior Nun, and Those About to Die. He also recently wrapped work on the third season of Netflix's One Piece, where he plays Koza, the leader of the rebel army.
Among Fourth Wing readers, he was a top fan pick for Xaden long before anyone official said a word.
German entertainment sites were already running pieces in early 2025 about whether he might be involved, partly because he was reportedly following the author on social media and partly because fans simply wanted it. The speculation turned out to be right.
Amazon MGM Studios acquired the rights to Yarros' Empyrean series in 2023, and the project has been developed alongside Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society, which holds an overall deal with the studio. It has not been a straight line.
Moira Walley-Beckett, the Anne with an E creator, was the original showrunner. She exited, and Locke & Key co-creator Meredith Averill took over in September 2025. Prime Video formally ordered the series in May 2026. Lisa Joy, who co-created Westworld, is set to direct the premiere and executive produce, alongside Jonathan Nolan and others.
The source material is enormous. The Empyrean series currently runs three books: Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, both released in 2023, and Onyx Storm in 2025. Onyx Storm was reported as the fastest-selling adult novel in two decades. Yarros has said the series is planned to span five books, though the fourth and fifth have not been formally announced.
That scale puts pressure on casting. Violet and Xaden already live in readers' heads in vivid detail, so whoever steps into the roles inherits a ready-made audience with strong opinions about the shape of a jaw or the color of an eye.
Quickly, and not uniformly. Her Campus rounded up the early response, and it split roughly the way you would expect. Plenty of readers were delighted by Sakraya, whose name had been floating around for years. McGregor drew more mixed reactions. Some fans argued she reads differently from the Violet they pictured, while others pointed to the size difference between the two actors as a point in the casting's favor, since Violet is described as slight next to the people around her.
None of that is surprising. A fandom this large rarely agrees on anything, least of all a face.
The reports leave several gaps. Prime Video has not confirmed the casting itself. There is no premiere date. The supporting roles, including Violet's friends Rhiannon and Ridoc and the dragons that anchor the whole story, have not been announced, and neither has a production start date or a filming location.
Dragons, in particular, are a budget question the series will have to answer on screen. The books lean on them constantly, and the bond between rider and dragon carries emotional weight in nearly every major scene.
For now, readers have two names and a showrunner. An official announcement from Amazon would be the next step, and further casting for the supporting ensemble is likely to follow once the leads are formally confirmed.
