Roy shares that he got similar guidance from Heughan, who told him, “It goes by so quickly. There are days where it’s going to be rough, but you just have to step back and appreciate it. Slow down and enjoy it.”
At lunch, I check in with Seamus McLean Ross and Sam Retford, who play Colum and Dougal MacKenzie, two brothers battling to be laird.
“I think there’s been this highly Apollonian and Dionysian contrast between the two,” Retford remarks.
“Don’t know what either of those words mean,” McLean Ross deadpans.
Retford explains: “It’s a fantastic story: two brothers, Apollo and Dionysus, and their various approaches as gods of chaos and order, and how they balance each other out.”
Retford used to help friends with their Outlander auditions. He was thinking about retiring from acting before he auditioned for the role of Brian Fraser in the prequel. “I was eating a pork chop in the self-tape or something ridiculous like that,” he tells me. Three months later, he received sides for Dougal. “I remember reading him on the page and thinking, Dream job.” His second audition was no less chaotic: “I didn’t know what time it was, my phone had broken, and I ended up just sat cross-legged outside [casting director Suzanne Smith’s] office, eating a watermelon with a knife.”
McLean Ross plays Slater’s brother, and he loves their dynamic. “Harriet breaks my heart when I’m acting with her. It’s so hard, because Colum breaks her heart on the show. He loves her, but he also loves his clan. He’s driven by this ambition he doesn’t fully understand.”
Heughan can’t wait to see the new series out in the world. “I’m hugely excited. I’m probably going to be the biggest fan. They’re a beautiful cast. I’m really happy for them.”
For the Outlander gang, Comic-Con weekend is bittersweet. “I feel like I could cry now,” Rankin says, thinking back to watching Balfe and Heughan shooting their final scene. “We just felt like we wanted to be there. What we didn’t know is that it was a closed set. There were 100 of us just all standing around, waiting for Sam and Caitríona to wrap because it was the last shot. I definitely welled up.”
“It was a seven-and-a-half-minute take, a ton of dialogue, very intimate. And, obviously, you know that all the crew were there—you could feel the tension,” Heughan remembers. “I did my close-up first, and I was just trying to get through it, to be honest. I think I sort of shut down internally. I could see Caitríona getting more emotional. I think it was her eyebrow or her cheek—something was twitching the whole way. Then we wrapped and walked out, and everyone was there. They called a wrap on it and I was crying. There were tears in our eyes. Caitríona was a mess—she was proper, I think she said, ‘ugly crying.’ I was very emotional as well. It was exhausting—but also wonderful.”