You can’t say they didn’t warn you.



For months, Outlander’s actors and producers have teased that the series takes a very dark turn. Of course, after seeing the penultimate episode of Season 1, “Wentworth Prison,” it is hard to imagine that even folks who have read the Diana Gabaldon books were fully prepared for the brutality, vulnerability, bloodshed, and perversely sexual back-licking. (And having seen the May 30 finale, we can only say it gets even harder to watch.)

It wasn’t easy for the actors to go there either. But it was a “fulfilling challenge,” according to Tobias Menzies, who sat down with Yahoo TV in Los Angeles a few weeks ago to discuss the sure-to-be controversial return of Black Jack, the new round of mental and physical torture he inflicts on the great Scot (Sam Heughan), and the Season 2 return of his lighter side, Frank.

Related: ‘Outlander’ Postmortem: Get Away With Murtagh

You guys kept saying that it was going to some very intense places, and you weren’t lying.

The stuff in Wentworth is more evil and darker than anything we have seen to date. But hopefully we also achieved something more emotional and psychological as their relationship and journey together deepen. I’m always very keen for Jack to be as complicated as possible so that he’s not just a sequence of really unpleasant behaviors. I hope that it will give more insight into why these two characters do what they do. I feel like the stuff we shot was a fittingly complicated ending to that arc. Jack has an obsession, a fascination with this boy, this man. I think if we got it right, there will be emotion in there, some sorrow. It costs Jack to do these things. He is driven by some force that he probably couldn’t even articulate himself. I feel like in some perverse way it is a desire for engagement, for contact.

Is it a desire to get with him?

I’m not sure I totally agree that it is about getting with him. How I rationalized it for myself was obviously taking the event of the flogging as the beginning. In that event, he encountered someone who was able to match him unlike anyone else had before. Jamie was able to endure the physical pain in a way that no one else had before, so obviously for someone who is interested in administering pain to people, it intrigues him. If we are to believe that sadomasochism is his kink, then Jamie represents someone who cannot be mastered and that is a challenge. He wants to break and dominate him to prove he can. I also think at some level he is struck by Jamie as a human being. Jack is not without his small moments of humanity. He has admiration for people. The weird thing is then his admiration is manifested and communicated by wanting to take it apart and find out how it works. That’s where the brutality comes in.

View photos

But then why couldn’t he get aroused with Jenny?

I think the event with Jenny is a sort of curious byline, really. She stumbles on something that unnerves him, and probably that has never happened to him before. Her intuiting that by laughing at him, it would unman him. It saved her from any further torture.

What was the process for you for nailing (sometimes literally) the darkest moments?

It was handled like a twisted, curious love story. We did really want to find moments of genuine tenderness between them. In terms of filming, we didn’t talk about it hugely in between. Those things you have to negotiate with the different personalities you are working with. For whatever reason, Sam and I didn’t feel the need for that. One of the dangers is talking about a scene so much that nothing occurs for the first time in the scene, and he was supposed to be enduring this horrible experience for the first time. We decided to show it here and talk elsewhere. If you haven’t pinned everything down in advance, you are forced to discover it in front of the camera and something more live can happen. Having moments where one or the other is genuinely surprised by what has happened is not un-useful as long as it is done within a safe and trusting framework.