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On last night’s episode of Outlander, we saw Claire grapple with her longing for Jamie by…trying to make a sex life work with Frank? If you were confused about the push and pull of Claire and Frank’s marriage, that’s quite alright! Outlander has gone out of its way this season to establish the complex bond the two share. After all, they were happily married once upon a time. Then some magical stones and an 18th century highlander got between them.
Decider joined other outlets for a roundtable interview with stars Caitriona Balfe and Tobias Menzies during this summer’s TCA press tour, and the actors spoke about Claire and Frank’s beautifully complicated relationship this season.
Balfe explained, “What I loved about it was just that the writers really allowed it to be very complex. And we fought very hard for that in the beginning because I think, you know, you don’t want to just play, ‘Oh, they hate each other, they’re really unhappy, she loves somebody else, he’s really disappointed.’ Every scene has that. You don’t wanna do that. You wanted it to feel like there was hope there especially in the beginning that maybe they could make it work.”
“Also,” she added, “to imagine that two people lived for twenty years together there has to be moments of levity, there has to be moments of understanding and connection. You know, maybe the love wasn’t passionate as it once was but that it’s platonic and that there’s respect for each other. So what was great was trying to find — because we didn’t have a huge amount of time to tell this story and it is almost bookended by two massive fights. So we were trying to find how do we instill these moments, you know, in this sort of short time that we have.”
“It wasn’t like a foregone conclusion,” Menzies explained. “The danger is like watching people have a terrible time in their marriage…and that’s it. So hopefully I feel like with the scene in the hospital with the baby arriving you get a moment of like oh yeah maybe it could work and the more moments you have like that makes it a bit more interesting it is.”
Also, it wasn’t always, you know, the dynamic of Frank chasing and Claire being chased,” Menzies said. He explained that we can see this in their would-be love scene by the fire. “In the script it was kind of driven by him,” he said. “And then making it her that seduces him makes it, you know, there’s Claire even though she’s — you know, yes, she has these feelings for Jamie but she’s still actively trying to make this marriage work. So, they’re both involved.”
It may look like Claire is betraying her central core by attempting to make things work with Frank, since she’s hopelessly in love with Jamie, but Balfe explained that she saw the move as essential to Claire’s character. “You know, the audience knows that Jamie didn’t die, but Claire doesn’t,” Balfe said. “So if you have her never trying to move forward in her life, well that’s a very tragic character. I think part of Claire’s DNA is that she’s a survivor and that she gets on with it. You know, she may have put a side of herself aside, but she does create a positive and productive life for herself which I like about her.”
In a parallel storyline, the audience saw Jamie attempting to move on with his life back in 1750s Scotland. There, he sleeps with Jenny’s maid Mary MacNab. The moment is less about passion and more about him returning to some semblance of himself. Still, both Claire and Jamie continue to struggle with their longings for one another.
