SPOTLIGHT:

SAM HEUGHAN AS JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER

For more than twenty years, James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser has endured as one of contemporary fiction’s most beloved male characters. Handsome, brawny, charming, sexy, and loyal, to name just a few of his positive attributes, Jamie’s proverbial shoes were always going to be impossible for any mortal man to fill…until they weren’t.

When Outlander the television series entered its casting phase, everyone, from Diana Gabaldon to producers to fans, assumed finding the “right” Jamie Fraser was going to be a long slog through piles of unworthy headshots and audition tapes. But Scottish actor Sam Heughan arrived early in the process and, to everyone’s shock, quickly owned the part in all of the producers’ eyes.

“When I found out I got the part, I was over the moon,” Sam Heughan says. He knew that trying to embody what for many people was the perfect man was never going to be possible, so he focused instead on creating a Jamie tied to the reality of his time and experiences. “I remember reading Diana’s graphic novel [The Exile], which was a great way to understand Jamie’s journey before we meet him in the show,” the actor says. “He has just arrived back from France and is an outlaw. He’s fallen in with Dougal and the other MacKenzies, but they’re not to be trusted either. Even going back to [Castle] Leoch is not the best place for Jamie, so he’s not sleeping in the castle. He’s sleeping outdoors in the stables, because he can’t be seen. He is someone that is on the run and keeping himself shrouded.”

Jamie’s sense of isolation became one of the cornerstones of Heughan’s interpretation of the character. To stay alive, he has to stay independent, relying on only one true ally: Murtagh FitzGibbons Fraser. “Early on, myself and Duncan [Lacroix] were always very aware of where each other was in relation to the other MacKenzies,” Heughan reveals. “What we said from the start is that they are obviously family and they are the only two people that they can really trust. At a moment’s notice they might need to escape together, or have each other’s back, so there’s a level of trust that is wonderful.”

Adding to their connection was the decision to have Heughan embracing the Gaelic language to speak with Murtagh. “I think that was definitely the way in for me to Jamie,” Heughan says. “Obviously coming from Scotland, I had seen it around and heard people talk it but didn’t really understand where it came from. Our Gaelic coach, Àdhamh Ó Broin, really gave me an understanding of where the Gaels came from. I realized that the more I read into it, the more I found it a fascinating language that is very descriptive. I loved looking at the geography of Scotland and finding the [location] names and then finding out what they actually meant. So Jamie is a Gaelic speaker first and foremost; that was his first language. I try to keep it, and maintain it, throughout the seasons, as I think it gives [him] an element of honesty.”

Heughan’s immersion into the language also opened the actor up to a deeper understanding of his native country’s clan culture. “We looked at the history of Clan Fraser,” he explains. “They’ve got French roots, so that was quite interesting to look at their motto [Je suis prest] and their general geography. I was also really interested to learn about all the different clans and the way they interacted with each other and also fought with each other. We realized that it was never easy. They were constantly warring with each other and forming alliances and then falling out with them.”

Jamie’s personal history, the cultural context, and the character’s relative isolation make for a man yearning for connection, when fate literally drops Claire Beauchamp Randall into his path in “Sassenach.” “The moment he sees her, I think, is the moment he falls for her,” Heughan says. “I tried to play it in that moment, and I think you can see it,” the actor continues. But after that, “he guards himself a little bit, because she could disappear at any point. I think Jamie can be quite outgoing and very expressive in his love when he is finally with Claire. But before that, I wanted him to maintain this front of capable Highlander.

“The men then would not talk about their feelings,” he chuckles. “Life at that point was very dangerous and very short. He had to look out for himself, protect himself, and I think that initial [distance] is where it stems from.”

Aside from his relationship with Claire, Jamie’s actions in season one are largely driven by his interactions with Black Jack Randall. That first season outlines their violent history and then brings them together once more for a horrific dark passage of the soul in Wentworth Prison.

“I remember building up to it, thinking, Can I do this?” he says. “As an actor, you’re not even sure if you can go there or if it scares you to go there.”

It took about a week and a half to film the torture sequence. “With all the prosthetics and makeup involved, we were doing four hours of prosthetics in the morning before shooting,” he explains. “I’m coming in at four A.M., and then, obviously, a couple of hours at night to take it off. And then in between takes, I couldn’t just go off on my own to sit and relax. I would have to go into the makeup room and get all of the back prosthetics touched up. There’s no break in that. They were long, long days,” he remembers.

“In the evening, there was the process of taking off all the makeup and prosthetics and having a shower,” he recalls. “That was kind of the way to release it all and get rid of it. Everyone would leave the studio and I would stay there and do a quick workout in the gym, just to do something. I was staying in a little bed-and-breakfast right next door to the studio because we were in so early in the morning, so I was living this strange little life. I think that helped, living in this little bubble. It felt very much like being in this prison cell and that was my little world for that week and a half.

“In the real darkness of it, in between takes of some pretty heady stuff, I do remember [director] Anna Foerster coming up to me and saying, ‘Let it go now. Just go and relax. We got it.’ That was such a relief when it was over,” he says. Heughan says he’s grateful to get the opportunity to play such intense content. “When you’re dealing with such big, emotional darkness, it’s great to be able to take yourself there. In TV, you don’t always get to do that, so it’s nice to be given the opportunity to really stretch yourself.”

Though Jamie escapes that cell, the repercussions of his assault are very much present in the first half of season two, as Claire and Jamie endeavor to change history by subverting Prince Charlie’s rebellion. Heughan says there was a heaviness that existed underneath the gilded Parisian salons. “Myself and Caitriona both felt when we first came back to season two that it was quite unsettling, because the characters that we knew so well were not being themselves,” he explains. “He’s a very honorable man but, I guess, he learns to be deceitful. And then, he is still obviously not addressing the trauma that happened to him. He has brushed it under the carpet, not thinking about it and throwing himself into this mission.”

It takes Claire and Jamie bridging the chasm together, as well as the news that Black Jack Randall is alive, for Jamie to find himself again. “He was a shadow of himself in the first half of the [second] season, not being in control of his own destiny,” Heughan muses. “When he finds out Randall is alive, it’s like he is reborn. He can be in control and take charge. I really wanted that to be the moment that we see Jamie become himself again. It’s a buoyant kind of happiness. He knows Randall is alive, so he can now take his vengeance.”

Once the narrative returned to Scotland, Heughan says, the hours felt like pressure cookers for the characters. “Every action has a real consequence,” he says. “There are a lot of promises made, and he does things that he says he won’t do. It does feel that they are being strangled by time, because there is this finite point, which is the Battle of Culloden. It is really life and death.”

But Culloden turns out to be inescapable, and that realization forces Jamie to make the most soul-shattering choice of his life, to save his wife and child by sending Claire back through the stones. In Heughan’s last scene of the season, he chose to play the goodbye at Craigh na Dun without desperation. “At that point, there’s a calm to him,” he says. “Jamie knows that this is it, and this is what needs to happen now. The fact is that he is resigned and he knows his fate. He knows what needs to happen and that he needs to guide her gently, out of love and out of protecting her.”