Outlander’s Tobias Menzies has responded to his co-star Sam Heughan’s remarks about having to film a “harrowing” scene on the time-travel series.
Responding to Outlander co-star Sam Heughan’s comments about the challenging filming of a “harrowing” scene, Tobias Menzies has expressed his thoughts.
Heughan’s character Jamie Fraser endures a brutal sexual assault from Menzies’s Black Jack Randall on the historical drama, a scene Heughan described as “harrowing” and “exhausting” in his 2022 memoir.
The actor also noted that this prompted him to insist on an intimacy coordinator for the show. Despite feelings that it wasn’t necessary to film fully nude scenes and concerns over sexualising the horror of the assault, only Jamie’s post-assault nudity was eventually shown, with the more explicit content not making the final cut, reports the Scottish Daily Express.
Speaking to The Independent, Menzies said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard that, that’s sad to hear.” He added: “My feeling about what we shot was that it didn’t feel decorative – it felt earned by what was going on in the drama. I felt that we showed something very, very unpleasant, and honest.”
Menzies went on to say, “It is shocking and certainly we went quite dark with it, but that felt like a way of avoiding the accusations of it being sexualised and titillating. We just made it very, very brutal, which is what that is.”
He mentioned that the prison scene represented the “fundamental wound” from which many of the show’s narratives unraveled. “Whether we could have done that by allusion or by reference, that’s a question that was above my paygrade at that time.”
In the time-travel series Outlander, Menzies played the dual roles of a historian and his ruthless ancestor during the first three seasons.