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When Outlander began in 2014, it promised to be a time-traveling epic that would span decades in the lives of Claire Randall, Jamie Fraser, Brianna Fraser MacKenzie, and Roger MacKenzie – all beloved characters in Diana Gabaldon’s celebrated books. Now, well over a decade later, the Starz show is finally coming to a close with its eighth season, even as prequel series Blood of My Blood continues to revisit the familial history of some of the show’s characters.
Actors Sophie Skelton and Richard Rankin, who portrayed Brianna and Roger in Outlander from 2016 onwards, tell Den of Geek that they had to process some rather unexpected temporal anomalies of their own after spending so much time on the hit Starz show, as they returned to a world that had moved on without them.
“No one prepared me for the kind of time capsule that Outlander was,” Skelton says. “When I left the show, a lot of our cast and crew had gotten married and had kids, but when I left Scotland and that decade of my life, I felt like I had to start from scratch a little bit. Life had moved on around us. I moved back to London, like, ‘I’ll hang out with my friends again,’ and now they’re all married with kids. And I was like, ‘Oh, life’s moved on. While I was in little old Glasgow.”
Rankin describes a similarly strange experience: “All of a sudden, it’s nine or 10 years condensed into what feels like the blink of an eye and so much has happened within that time. With social media, you’ll have reminders on your phone or memories, and you look at them and feel like it was like yesterday, but actually it was like seven years ago. You were in a very different place in your life, but you had that constant of the show and everyone on it. It’s a weird perception of the time that’s passed.”
Skelton and Rankin’s characters would be present at different points in both American and Scottish history throughout Outlander’s tenure, so they initially visited key historical sites to understand the past, whether that was the Wardlaw Mausoleum or the fields of Culloden. Skelton recalls that the duo’s visit to Culloden also involved a trip to a local bookstore to pick up a copy of the latest book in Gabaldon’s series. “The man in the store said, ‘They’re making a series out of this,’ and we were like, ‘Oh, really?’ We didn’t have the heart to tell him.”
The first episode of Outlander season 8 is available to stream on Starz now.
The post “Life Had Moved On” – Outlander Stars Open Up On Strange Aftermath of Leaving the Show appeared first on Den of Geek.
