SPOTLIGHT:

TOBIAS MENZIES AS FRANK RANDALL AND JONATHAN “BLACK JACK” RANDALL

It’s a rare achievement for one actor to play two such distinct characters that some audiences believe them to be played by separate actors. But British actor Tobias Menzies, who has spent the better part of two years bewitching audiences with his portrayals of Frank Randall and Jonathan “Black Jack” Randall, has been able to give each an incredibly distinct life onscreen. The former is the loving, erudite husband of Claire Beauchamp Randall in 1945, while the latter is the depraved British officer with a penchant for sadism. That audiences don’t boo or wince every time Frank merely appears is no small thing, and keeping the two distinct was a guiding principle in how Menzies approached the roles.

“It sounds odd, but I actually didn’t spend a huge amount of time thinking of them as a pair, really. I approached them both independently,” Menzies explains. “I just trusted that if I played the situations and the character, what they’d been through would play through, and that would do the work. And I felt like the writing was different enough for the two of them.”

A very familiar face in British television and theater circles, Menzies came up for the role via casting director Suzanne Smith. Reading as both men, Menzies made an immediate impression on the producers and sat down soon after to discuss the intricacies, and subtle connections, between the men with executive producer Ron Moore.

“He too was interested in the similarities between Jack and Frank,” Menzies remembers. “Obviously they’re both men who have been through wars, although wars separated by a couple hundred years. I think both Jack and Frank are men who are formed by those experiences, arguably, but they come to different conclusions. I think Frank is no less affected by his war experience.”

With his characters’ motivations established, Menzies started his preparation in earnest. “I was keen not to rely on anything too physical to differentiate them,” the actor says ardently. “It could have been a very easy route with Jack, I suppose. He might have lent himself to something a bit more ostentatious and prop-ridden, maybe. But it certainly wasn’t something that I was particularly interested in. I wanted him to be real and three-dimensional, even though he is obviously an out-and-out villain. I was trying to give as much shape to that as possible.”

Instead, Menzies worked to distinguish them in much subtler ways. “We were aiming for the difference being in the eyes,” he says. Playing Frank, Menzies softened his face and countenance, especially when looking at Claire. “I think making him more flesh and blood than he is in the books gives him more complexity,” the actor says. “It creates some genuine drama really for Claire, in the choice to stay with Jamie. That was a complicated and sort of muscle-y decision, rather than Frank being an irrelevance. That’s why we all wanted to turn the heat up on Frank and make that relationship hotter and more meaningful. I think it then raises the stakes for Claire.”

When it came time to develop Black Jack, Menzies says the process took longer. “He definitely was the one I had to think about more carefully,” he says with consideration. “Obviously, Frank is a lot closer to me and Jack is the stretch.”

The actor says Black Jack finally appeared “partly through some conversation with the writers, a little bit of interaction with Diana, and then my gut feeling.” Determining his psychology was key. “I quite firmly was much more interested in [Black Jack] as an investigation of a sadist rather than particularly concentrating on the idea that he’s in love with Jamie. It’s not that he has huge bravado and is very drawn to Jamie in a straightforward erotic homosexual sense. I wanted to make it slightly odder than that, to make it that Jamie became this sort of conundrum that the sadist in Jack wanted to unpick. He met this man who, in a way, was everything that maybe Jack wasn’t or Jack had lost. That, to me, felt like the emotions were therefore darker and more complicated, richer and potentially stronger than just straightforward lust. If he was doing all of those things just for a turn-on, that makes him irredeemable, really. Whereas if he’s coming out of his own damage from what he’s experienced in war, that for me felt like it was a more interesting route through.”

Asked his thoughts on whether Black Jack’s dark impulses are first uncorked by Jamie, Menzies says no. “I think his sadism has expressed itself in the past,” he says with assurance. “Lallybroch, I think, is a relatively minor chapter in that story. He goes to this place, the guy kicks off, and he does what he would normally do, which is partly military procedure.”

Menzies posits that Randall’s obsession with Jamie begins with a scene that happens entirely offscreen. “I think the penny drops in the thing that we don’t see, which is the previous flogging, where he sees that Jamie hasn’t been broken and then he takes on the second flogging himself. He is unable to break him again, and from then on, he realizes he has met, in a way, his match. That’s where the fire starts, I think. And I always wanted there to be a huge amount of respect for Jamie [from Randall]. As a human being, he recognizes nobility, in a way.”

The actor says the same can be said for how Randall views Claire. “It’s not just unpleasant behavior,” Menzies says of Randall’s aggressive actions toward her. “It’s coming out of a curiosity and excitement. There’s an energy there. She gives good game, and she can come back at you. There’s an aestheticism about him, and I think that everything that Claire is is pleasurable to him. He appreciates her wit, her physicality, and her beauty. He is not immune to them and appreciates them, even while he’s going about unpicking it.”

In season two, Menzies revives the character to plague the Frasers once more, but he was determined to present Randall in a different light. “My feeling was I didn’t want him to be quite so confident in the second season,” Menzies explains. “Due to the very extensive injuries as a result of the cattle, he physically has been reduced. And probably the fallout from what happened at Wentworth and the breach—I’d imagine just in terms of the military hierarchy, maybe the book was thrown at him.

“So when we first see Black Jack in ‘Untimely Resurrection,’ he’s in foreign enemy territory, actually,” he continues. “I think at the time Britain was at war with France. My provocation was, we should see someone who has some hairline cracks in the confidence as a result. My instinct was to meet someone changed, as much as possible, by what happened.”

That lays the groundwork for the heated duel between Randall and Jamie in “Best Laid Schemes…” after the discovery of Fergus’s assault. “That duel is driven by Jamie’s anger more than Jack’s, I think,” the actor says. “Jack’s taken what he wanted from Jamie, but he recognizes that he has to honor the challenge. Again, I think going in with that idea that he’s slightly less Teflon, there’s more apprehension and less feeling of invincibility going into that fight than maybe he would have had a few years before.”

Death is averted for both men with the arrival of the gendarmes, which opens the door for the conclusion of Claire’s own arc with Black Jack in “The Hail Mary.” The terminal condition of Jack’s brother, Alex, affords the audience one more opportunity to be surprised by the character, seeing him express love and devotion toward his sibling. “Jack’s brother represents the only sacred thing in him, really, and it is an anomaly,” Menzies explains. “His brother sees good in him, and that does odd, uncomfortable things to Jack, but yet he tries to be that person for his brother. I think it harks back to who he was prior to his experiences in the army.”

When Claire and Randall commiserate over Jack marrying Mary Hawkins to ensure that Alex’s child is raised well, Menzies says, he looked at that as an unexpected truce. “You could almost go as far as to say that maybe if you asked Jack, he might even describe them as friends,” he offers. “It’s very odd, but he feels a very deep connection with [Claire and Jamie] because of what they’ve experienced. There’s that line in Wentworth where he goes, ‘We will remember this moment for the rest of our lives.’ I think that is true, and that is a weird bond. That’s why he feels able to confess and seek Claire’s help with his brother, because there’s a level of understanding between them, and when he says, ‘I can’t marry the girl,’ she will understand that. Essentially, Jack doesn’t trust himself with the girl.”

Jack’s last violent outpouring of grief over his brother is the last Claire, Jamie, and the audience may ever see of Black Jack Randall, as his date with destiny beckons on Culloden Moor. Menzies assumes that Alex’s death represents “the loss of some final kind of plank to anything good within him.” Whether or not he’s satisfied with that ending is “a hard question to answer,” Menzies admits. “I think it’s a curiosity of the books and, in a way, this season that Jack does sort of disappear from the story, after having been such a strong presence in the first book. And he’s a wonderful baddie that Diana’s written, but she doesn’t really utilize him hugely from there on out. I think it’s a good [exit], but it’s also a question of, what do you do after Wentworth, in terms of where do you take that story? I think it was a conundrum for the writers.”

In the meantime, Menzies looks forward to further exploring Claire and Frank’s twenty years of marriage in Boston. “I think that could be interesting,” he says. “There’s a real profundity about what they find between them, for all its flaws and deeply compromised nature.”