Welcome to this week’s post episode interview round-up! Below are a few excerpts from new interviews with stars Caitriona Balfe, Sam Heughan, Tobias Menzies, executive producer Ron Moore, and makeup designer Annie McEwan. Be sure to click on the links to read the full interviews. Since these posts/interviews follow the latest episode, beware of spoilers for the current and future episodes.
Collider: Tobias Menzies on Black Jack’s Fate, and Frank’s Quiet Tragedy
What do you most enjoy about playing Frank, and what do you find most challenging with him?
MENZIES: He’s much more internal than Jack. He’s a study in suppressed emotion, really. It’s mainly about making it emotional and soulful enough. A lot of the stuff for Frank, especially in Season 3, is the build up of disappointments, resentments, sadnesses, and occasionally rages, and how he lets all of those things bubble under the surface. You have to feel all of that stuff in their marriage, even if it’s not always being verbalized. That’s always a challenge.
Entertainment Weekly: Outlander stars discuss Claire and Frank’s sleeping arrangement
“Obviously they’re unhappy but you can’t live with somebody for 20 years unless you find moments of joy and mutual respect, and there is love there even though it’s platonic,” Balfe explains. “I think it’s really heartbreaking when you see moments of them as they were way back in the beginning of season 1. They enjoy each other’s company and that they’re both smart people. Intellectually, they stimulate each other. But there’s just too much there, there’s too much pain and there’s too much disappointment. That will always be the thing that bubbles up and drives them apart.”
The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Outlander’ Team Sounds Off on Claire and Frank’s Dissolving Marriage
Claire finally took hold of her future in this episode by going to med school and becoming a surgeon. What spurred her to take action now?
Balfe: Claire realizes that she would never have been happy just being a stay-at-home mom. As much as she loves her daughter, it is just not enough for her. And then also because she has shut the door on this side of herself, her sexual passion and all of that, she needed a channel for all that energy that she has. I believe that the moment when the Dean puts her down in episode 1, that was the moment where she decided that she was going to go to medical school. And in this episode we see the manifestation of that decision and I love it. That’s such an important part of Claire’s personality. It’s so much of her identity, in her desire to heal and care for people. It’s also very telling of the time where her and Joe are both outcasts in the class. It’s nice to do those social commentaries without being preachy about them. We try and show it without commenting too much.
TV Line: Outlander’s Sam Heughan Talks Jamie’s Episode 2 Breakdown: ‘Everyone Around Him Gets Hurt’
Outlander‘s second episode found Jamie unkempt, unhappy and nearly unsuitable for human interaction after six years of living and grieving in solitude. “He’s just in pain all the time. He sees Claire everywhere. He’s reminded of his loss,” star Sam Heughan tells TVLine, “so he’s living with his instincts. He doesn’t really care about himself, he’s just living day to day with no real purpose.”
Yahoo!: ‘Outlander’ postmortem: Makeup designer Annie McEwan reveals how she made Sam Heughan ‘feral’
How did you go about transforming the dashing Sam Heughan into the ratty Dunbonnet?
The word that we used was feral. Jamie’s gone feral; he’s not washing or maybe washing once a month. He’s not looking after himself. He’s sort of given up a bit. So Sam had to be as unkempt and as mucky as we could do with makeup. I don’t know if you can even see that there’s some dreadlocks in his hair, but we did put some dreadlocks in it. The beard was hair-length and glued-on, because we didn’t have time for Sam to grow that big a beard. And then it was just about building up layers of dirt [with makeup].
There are six years between the end of Culloden and finding him in this cave, so it was an opportunity to age him up as well. He’s so golden, Sam. We took out the goldenness to make him a bit more gray and a bit more lifeless. I don’t know how much shows on camera, but they did a lot of work on him. A lot of little lines around his eyes from peering through the smoke of the fire and scrunching his eyes up. We looked at books about explorers and mountain men and how their faces had been coarsened by the weather. We tried to get all that in with paint. We also highlighted under his lashes and darkened them just to make that pouch be more prominent, and communicate Jamie’s depression. What we were trying to get away from is him looking gorgeous and not aged, so we did the opposite of that.
Do you remember Sam’s reaction when he saw himself in full Dunbonnet mode for the first time?
He loved it! He loves the mucky thing. He’s happier being mucky than doing the French thing. If he had the choice, he’d always go for mucky. Not that he’d want to have the beard again! It’s really uncomfortable. Nobody likes the process of having to sit in the makeup chair for almost two hours when you’ve still got a 12-hour shooting day and then cleaning it all off. But he loved the layers of dirt and the aging and all of that. Like I said he prefers that to being the clean, young Sam. He likes all the rugged stuff —t he swashbuckler, the man of war. He doesn’t like being in the powder room; he’d rather be out in the hills waving a sword about.
Source: Collider, Entertainment Weekly, The Hollywood Reporter, TV Line, Yahoo!
