Note: This story contains spoilers from “Outlander: Blood of my Blood” Episodes 1 and 2.
As Starz prepares to bid farewell to Sam Heughan’s Jamie and Caitriona Balfe’s Claire when “Outlander” airs its final season next year, the franchise turns its attention to the fated love stories of their parents with prequel series “Blood of my Blood.”
Harriet Slater and Jamie Roy play Jamie’s parents, Ellen MacKenzie and Brian Fraser, who struggle with what the actors liken to a “Romeo and Juliet” conflict coming from rival clans, while Hermione Corfield and Jeremy Irvine play Claire’s parents, Julia Moriston and Henry Beauchamp, who unite amid the treacherous conditions of WWI only to be split up again.
As the newcomers took on the roles, they faced a careful balancing act of finding “core similarities” between their characters and either Jamie or Claire, while trying not to replicate Heughan’s or Balfe’s performance. “You’re never a carbon copy of your parents,” Corfield told TheWrap. “I focus on the resilience and the intelligence they both have — their quick wittedness and their romantic elements — [Julia and Claire] both lead from the heart.”
Irvine echoed Corfield’s sentiments, noting that Henry and Claire’s similarities of intelligence and quick wit were also on the page, saying, “it definitely didn’t feel right to go and do a copycat exercise.”
“The spirit of Jamie Fraser was the most important thing that I really wanted to capture,” Slater said, noting that she drew from Sophie Skelton’s Brianna (Ellen’s granddaughter) and Laura Donnelly’s Jenny (Ellen’s daughter) for inspiration on playing the “badass” heroine. “She goes through some awful, awful experiences, and yet she comes out stronger from each and every one, and she uses her intelligence, her powers of persuasion and her determination to keep fighting. She’s a survivor.”
For Roy, the task of playing Jamie’s father came naturally. “I’ve just been told time and time again that Sam and I not only look very similar, but we act similar,” he said. “So I have it easy.”
The premiere episode of “Outlander: Blood of my Blood” plunges viewers into 18th-century Scotland in the wake of the death of Ellen’s father, Jacob MacKenzie, which prompts her to begin fearing for her agency and ability to remain unwed. It’s not until a clan gathering that Ellen and Brian first lay eyes on each other, and the duo quickly start to become close.
While Ellen and Brian don’t know each other’s clans during their initial meeting, the stakes are upped when they discover their “Romeo and Juliet” situation, which Roy and Slater hoped to convey as their characters struggled to resist their attraction.
“If we choose to go down this path, then we’re putting our lives in total danger from here on, and this could potentially ruin us both,” Roy said.
While the couple faces troubled road ahead, the actors wanted to convey the childlike nervousness felt by the couple, as Roy explains Brian’s sentiments as “holy s–t, I’ve just met the love of my life.” “Both these characters experience butterflies,” Roy said. “I want to hold your hand, but I shouldn’t be holding your hand because that’s not allowed, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
“They want one thing, but they’re really being pulled in another direction,” Slater added. They’re both completely torn by this situation that they have found themselves in”
While the premiere episode spotlights the beginnings of the romance between Ellen and Brian, viewers first meet Claire’s parents, Julia and Henry, as a married couple, who, while visiting the Scottish highlands on vacation, get torn apart when the infamous Craigh na Dun stones send Julia back from the 20th century to the 18th century, where Ellen and Brian’s love story is taking place. [Be on the lookout for quick glances of where Julia and Henry end up after some time in 1714]
Their love story is laid out in Episode 2, which sees Julia receiving an open letter from Henry deep from the trenches in WWI, kick-starting a pen-pal relationship between the pair as they ponder war and humankind and share literature with one another, which quickly turns into what Corfield calls an “epistolary romance.”
“They’re falling in love with each other’s words before they see their faces … there’s something very beautiful about that,” Corfield said. “They find a common interest in literature and in a view of the world, I think Julia falls in love with the way his mind works.”
Henry’s love for Julia becomes his driving force to get through the war. When he finally gets his leave granted, he finds Julia in the busy London crowd, and their months of back-and-forth pay off in a sweeping embrace. Their meeting marked the scene Corfield had shot outside of the studio, and the vast set in a park in Glasgow seemed to fit the “vital moment.”
“Jeremy [was] saying, ‘how does she know [it’s him] if he says that one line?’ How do we make that work?’ And I just did in the moment,” Corfield said. “You believe that they can sense each other. You believe that they would know instinctively that that was the person. And thank goodness they fancy each other.”
Henry and Julia tie the knot very shortly afterwards, and work through Henry’s PTSD from the war as they have their daughter, Claire. It’s not until Claire is five years old that the couple leaves her with her uncle as they voyage to Scotland, though their holiday gets extended when Julia is transported to the 18th century and is quickly kidnapped and brought to Castle Leathers — where Brian and the Fraser clan live — as a form of payment from her kidnappers.
As Julia gets acquainted with her newfound situation — which includes a handsy laird — Corfield likens Julia to a “caged lion” as her animalistic panic zeroes in a means to escape. “She soon realizes that escaping is not going to be easy, and that she’s in the middle of nowhere, and even if she could get out the castle, there’s no transport or any way of getting away from that, or knowing where she should even be going,” Corfield said.
Julia even receives some help from Brian, who takes the blame for her attempted escape in a dynamic Corfield compares to a brother-sister relationship, saying “Julia’s got a little bit more life experience than him, so I feel like it’s almost like an older sister talking to her younger brother.”
Henry follows Julia through the stones, and confirms she’s there after seeing a rock engraved with “S.W.A.K.,” to indicate the couple’s signature signoff, “sealed with a kiss.” Once he crosses through and struggles to find Julia, all that’s on Henry’s mind is survival, according to Irvine, leading him to quickly form an alliance with the wealthy Grant clan as their new advisor, which grants him safety as he searches for Julia.
“He’s got to somehow try to fit into this mad world,” Irvine said. “I didn’t want to play him like, ‘Oh, I know where this is’ … it takes him a while to come to terms with the fact that this is not the time he’s from. He’s just surviving moment-to-moment, and trying not to slip up.”
While Julia is already quite vulnerable without Henry as she barely escapes the laird’s desires, her pregnancy — which is not yet noticeable — makes her even more vulnerable, with Corfield teasing “Julia finds she has to take drastic measures to protect her baby, because it becomes clear that the baby would not be safe in that house … if anyone finds out about the pregnancy.”
“She’s not with her husband, she’s not with her daughter,” Corfield said. “She’s so worried about Claire — she’s five years old and she knows she’s safe with Uncle Lam, but the longing she feels for her daughter is out of control.”
“Outlander: Blood of my Blood” airs weekly on Fridays at 8:00 pm ET/PT on Starz in the U.S. and at 9:00 pm ET/PT in Canada. Episodes are available to stream Fridays on the Starz app.
