Sophie Skelton has a film out called 211, and with its release comes interviews. A couple of interviews from Deepest Dreams and Brief Take asked Sophie Skelton about her role of Brianna Randall on Outlander. Below are the relevant excerpts but head over to both websites to read the entire interviews.
From Deepest Dreams:
How has your time on Outlander changed your life in the big picture?
It really is. It kind of becomes – you live, breathe, drink and eat (it). It just becomes your whole life in a way. We have hiatuses when we’re not shooting or we’re not doing press or we’re prepping for the next season. They really love it and it’s wonder to have such a loyal fandom but it means you almost can’t abandon them in a way! That’s where our social media comes into play and you’re always responding to them on Twitter. It really does become part of your every day even when we are on a slight hiatus.
It influences (me) in that way because there are so many people who are passionate about it. They really support the show (and) you do really want to give a lot back to them. That’s a very different experience with features. You do a film and people watch it. They love it and they kind of step away from it for a while until maybe they watch the film again. But with something like Outlander you have people who’ve read the books 20 times over so it’s always an ongoing thing which is great. That means you never sort of step aside from the character – they’re always with you. You become very protective of your character.
From Brief Take:
BT: What you can tell me about the upcoming season of Outlander?
SS: We see Brianna go back in time to the kind of carefree ’70’s, and then we see the juxtaposition of the 1800’s, how that’s really different for Brianna. In the beginning, with losing her Mum, she sort of just became an orphan. She went from having two parents, to three, to none. And then she finds out some information about her parents and decides to go back in time to save their lives and change the course of history, and she sort of gets caught up in the American Revolution, just the corruption of the times. It’s good because then the show addresses a very relevant topic and things happen to Brianna that are in the media right now, just in terms of the modern day version of what happens to Bree. So hopefully again it will be one of those things that helps victims of abuse and seeing it through a character’s eyes again will allow people to have more empathy to go through what Brianna goes through, but also helps victims too. But it’s interesting because you do see a modern woman out of her time dealing with problems that she wouldn’t even see in her day.
BT: Why do you think Outlander resonates so much with such a wide audience?
SS: I think it’s so important because it’s a female-led show and it shows the strength of a modern day woman out of her time. When Claire’s character starts in the war, that’s when women really did step up and become part of the work force. When the soldiers were away, the women became the work force, and I think that that was a really strong period of history. I think that what’s so great about the show in terms of its message, is that you have so many cultures colliding and so many races colliding, people from different walks of life. I think that there is a lot of nudity and there is some violence in this season as well, but none of it is there for gratuitous reasons or just for the sake of being explicit. It’s all things that happened in the time, people were a lot more liberal with their bodies and people were more violent and they do more openly criminal things, and so I think it’s great not to bury those things in history. So I think that this season in particular addresses America becoming America; it’s the New World and a wonderful thing to see all these people from different countries coming together as one.
Source: Brief Take, Deepest Dreams
