‘Outlander’: Sam Heughan on ‘Interpretation’ of Last Jamie and Claire Scene in Finale (Exclusive)
The finale of Outlander gave us a happy ending with both Claire and Jamie Fraser (Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan) waking up to live another day after she used her magical powers — an effort that turned her hair white — to heal him after his death at King’s Mountain.
But according to Heughan, that’s not the only way to look at it. “As for them surviving, well, I guess that’s up to you,” the actor tells TV Insider. “Do they survive? They open their eyes, but they both changed. Well, Claire’s changed. They’re lying on the big standing stone, which is now broken. It has a crack in it. So, something’s changed and whether or not they’re in this world or the next, I don’t know, but I think that’s up to interpretation.” Watch the full Inside Outlander aftershow above. (And be sure to check out Caitriona Balfe’s here.)
Heughan himself didn’t know how the series would end until about a week before it was shot. “It was kept under wraps and there was this fake ending that we read through where I think it was with George Washington and Jamie,” Heughan reveals.
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But when the actor did get the real script, his character’s death was no surprise: “I knew it was coming. I think Jamie knew. He’s always known that since he met Claire, his fate is sealed. He’s going to die for this woman that he loves. So, it’s not a surprise, but yeah, I think the whole season was really hard because you just knew it was coming, not only the end of the show, but the end of Jamie. So, there was this sort of duality or parallel journey for myself and the character. [It was] really hard, but also a release. As the gunshot comes out — we shot that quite a lot, quite a few times because obviously we shot it in slow-mo and Steadicam and it was quite hard to get it right. But then lying on the mountain top was kind of quite peaceful, to be honest.”
But another scene from the episode touched Heughan’s heart: where Jamie goes to talk to the bees. “That was probably one of my favorite scenes, I think, of the whole season, because it was just a real moment of him saying goodbye to the things he loves and knowing that it will live on without him,” the actor tells us.
And if you loved the scenes of younger Jamie, thank Heughan. “I certainly was really happy to do the ghost. Then the younger version of Jamie at the stones, that was something I pushed for. I really wanted to see, and I really loved going back, to young Jamie, a younger version of him, perhaps at the very beginning of his story,” Heughan says. “He’s returned to Scotland and almost sets this whole thing in motion maybe.”
Hearing Heughan say “maybe” and “it’s up to you” makes it clear there are many ways to interpret this series finale. But one thing is for certain, Claire and Jamie’s love story, based on the bestselling novels by Diana Gabaldon and which has obsessed fans since Outlander debuted on Starz in 2014, will never really die. Nor will the tight relationship between Balfe and Heughan.
Heughan says of their final lovemaking scene, “We’ve been through so much together as actors. We approached those scenes from the beginning with trepidation and had to work our way through it together. And this was the same. We were there for each other, and I think it couldn’t be with anyone else. Caitriona and I have a shorthand. We have a trust in each other. It was really beautiful. At the end, they brought us a glass of champagne. They were like, ‘It’s your last ever intimate scene.’ We celebrated that.”
But the toughest moment to shoot was the last one they ever did together, where Claire and Jamie are talking in bed. “As the scene went on, people started to gather to watch and we really felt the weight of the moment,” Heughan tells us. “Caitriona’s eye was just buzzing. It was sort of flickering in her closeup, but I was trying desperately just to maintain some sort of state of decorum. I was surprised the scene worked. I actually honestly thought it was not going to work because we were both so kind of tense with emotion. And then of course the release and the sort of bittersweet goodbye when they called the final wrap.”
But is it really the end? We’re going to hang onto the idea that there are many ways to read this episode and that the door has been left open for another chapter in the Frasers’ story. Watch the video above for the full interview.
