SPOTLIGHT:

LOTTE VERBEEK AS GEILLIS DUNCAN

Dutch actress Lotte Verbeek hasn’t been in the acting game that long, but she’s already made a name for herself playing enigmatic beauties who often know more than they’re willing to share. There’s something in her eyes and the impish curve of her smile that’s beguiling and a little dangerous.

Hence the perfect fit of Verbeek to Outlander’s Geillis Duncan, the red-haired firebrand who knows many a thing about keeping secrets. “I tend to like roles that are a little mysterious,” the actress says with a smile. “As in real life, you don’t get the full person at first glance, ever. There’s always a story behind everybody. I think the characters that sometimes make an effort to cover that up, or present themselves in a different way, those characters are extra interesting.”

Geillis certainly fits that description as a character, but interestingly enough, Verbeek initially auditioned to play Claire. Sometime later, Verbeek says, her agent came back with a request by the casting team for her to read for another part, Geillis Duncan.

“When I saw how Geillis is described as being Scottish, tall, blond, and green-eyed, I was like, ‘Well, that’s not me,’ ” she laughs. “But my agent encouraged me to just have a play with it, so I did. The first scene you actually see me in the first season, that was my audition piece.”

The producers offered Verbeek the part, despite the fact that the multilingual actress was not fluent in the Scottish brogue. “English is not my first language,” Verbeek explains, “and Scottish gets tricky even for Brits, so how would I be able to do it?” With the help of on-set dialect coach Carol Ann Crawford, Verbeek says, she was able to get a handle on the right dialect. “I was also lucky to have a friend whose wife is Scottish and happens to have a lovely voice and a lovely accent. I used her help too. Now every time I go back to Scotland, I get right back into it.”

With accent and demeanor in place, Verbeek says, playing Geillis was a constant exercise in discovery. The actress sees her character as a rebel and outcast by choice. “She’s an activist and she believes in what she believes in. She’s willing to even die for it. In the sixties, she’s kind of a rock star, and there’s flyers and posters of her everywhere. But after she travels through time, she is a bit of an outcast, even though she’s married well and she’s in a nice house.”

Isolated by her cause in the eighteenth century, Geillis sees Claire’s arrival as an opportunity to genuinely connect again, Verbeek says. “You can sense that she really needs and wants a friend,” she muses. “She’s kind of lonely too in that world. Yet she’s kind of cruel toward Claire. She’s not necessarily just being nice, you know? She’s toying around with her too. She knows more than Claire knows and she could have helped Claire more by being less concealing, but she doesn’t. I kind of like that,” she laughs.