Sam Heughan on His Final Day Shooting ‘Outlander’ After 12 Years as Jamie Fraser.
When we sat down with Sam Heughan, he still hadn’t watched the finale of “Outlander,” the Starz series he’s starred on as Jamie Fraser for eight seasons across 12 years. Mostly, that’s because he’s already experienced the series “ending” again and again. “The whole [eighth] season was basically a goodbye,” he tells us on the latest episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast. “You’d be like: Oh, today’s the last time we’re going to be here or with this person. So it was kind of quite traumatic, because you’re constantly in the state of saying goodbye and then treating it like it’s just another day at work.”
That included his final day sharing a scene with Caitríona Balfe, who has been Jamie’s time-traveling love interest Claire Beauchamp since the very first chemistry reads.
“The last main day of shooting on main camera was myself and Caitríona. We had this very, very long dialogue scene, and we were both extremely emotional, trying to suppress it,” Heughan says. “Caitríona’s eyebrow during her close-up was just shaking the whole time; you could see she was trying to hold it back. And I too was just pushing down all my emotion to try and remain calm and stable for the scene. Of course, once wrap was called, it was an outpouring of emotion.”
Then, as is always the case for the working actor, life went on. You just take the most meaningful experiences with you into the next gig. “I don’t think I’m ever going to say goodbye,” Heughan says. “The character is always going to be there. The show will always be part of us. People will always recognize us for that…. It’s so nice to be working on other stuff, but I think when you’re on these other jobs, it makes you realize how lucky we were to be in that moment on ‘Outlander.’ ”
In this episode, Heughan takes us on the entire journey from his training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and booking “Outlander” to evolving as an actor over 101 episodes and where he’s headed next.
