EPISODE 102: CASTLE LEOCH
WRITER: RONALD D. MOORE 
DIRECTOR: JOHN DAHL
With Claire the focus of “Sassenach,” the second hour of the series was all about introducing the Highland culture—and the character of Jamie Fraser, played, of course, by Sam Heughan—to the audience. “Castle Leoch” establishes the dark and imposing castle as the epicenter of Clan MacKenzie. At the ruling seat and home of Colum MacKenzie (Gary Lewis), Claire finds herself forced to adapt to her new situation and the intense hierarchy within the castle walls. A still-healing Jamie becomes Claire’s first advocate and friend, in a hostile environment.
“In the second episode, once we started getting into the Castle Leoch stuff with Jamie, that’s where he really began to shine,” Ron Moore says of unveiling Jamie as a character on the show. “You really saw the chemistry between [Claire and Jamie], like in the scene before the fire in Castle Leoch, when she is dressing his wound and he’s talking about Jack, or the stable scenes.”
For director John Dahl, “Castle Leoch” allowed him to establish the world of the Highlanders at its peak of wealth and formality, fleshing out the people who served the laird and his extended family. Native Scottish actors Gary Lewis, Graham McTavish, and Sam Heughan participated in a Highlander boot camp with the rest of their clan castmates, which Dahl says bonded the men and set the tone for the first two episodes. “They were all so excited to be working on this show that’s set in Scotland and in this period,” he explains. “They just embraced it. They were learning their Gaelic and they were so into it. They’d all come to the set, do a couple of takes, maybe get a note here or there, but they would just nail it.”
As for capturing the interior aesthetic of the castle, Dahl says the mandate from Moore was, make it dirty. “It’s always filthy but lit beautifully,” the director laughs.
The soot came honestly too, as Dahl says the producers wanted Jon Gary Steele’s sets lit with real candles to create an authentic gloom. “They were double wicked, because [DP] David Higgs was a little concerned about the luminance coming out of them. I don’t know how many hundreds of candles were up on the chandeliers. They were on a pulley system, so you can lower them down, replace them, then light them, and then roll them back up. If we were going to stop for a long period of time, we’d bring them down and blow them out. I think we went through hundreds of candles the first day we shot in that grand ballroom, because double-wicked candles burn twice as fast as a regular wicked candle. And every now and then one of the extras would feel some hot wax going down the back of their neck.”
“[Jamie’s flogging] establishes the relationship with Black Jack Randall and also his sister, Jenny. It was my first day and I think I was more concerned about the fight, trying to remember all the moves. I basically have to fight off two guards. It was good fun. And then we got into the scene with Tobias, who got carried away. There were two takes that he managed to hit me on every [lash], and it was quite amusing. I said, ‘That’s pretty good, actually. That really hurt.’ I didn’t have to do any acting. I think that was just a sign of things to come, that we could really push each other and go to the limits of what an actor is allowed to do or not allowed to do. It was a very strong standoff between Jamie and Black Jack, setting that relationship up for each of them.”
“We were filming that scene where [Mrs. Fitz] dresses Claire, and people were like, ‘Do you need any help with that?’ When Annette [Badland, who plays Mrs. Fitz] starts singing, that’s because the silence went on for so long that Annette improvised humming and singing while she did it. The silence was so painful. They cut it down to that really short clip, but the whole thing took forever and everybody was just dying. I’m like, you’ve all learned how long it takes to get dressed in the eighteenth century. It was a great scene.”
Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser getting notes from Ron Moore (right).
“In the feast scene, Colum really wants to present to Claire the sophistication, the good food, the good glasses, the good wine, their knowledge of history. He seems to like Claire, but he is also trying to gather information from Claire. He’s also telling her something about himself and the MacKenzies.”
“The end of the episode, where Claire’s being told, ‘You’re staying and you’re not leaving,’ Colum leaves her and walks up the stairs. I’m waiting at the top of the stairs and we both stand in the doorway and I very deliberately shut the door on her. We made that very deliberate choice as a sort of homage to the very end of The Godfather, when Michael Corleone shuts the door on Diane Keaton.”
