Outlander nearly found itself under “Black Jack” Randall’s thumb a little longer.
Author Diana Gabaldon’s notorious villain, brought to life on screen by Tobias Menzies, played a major role in the show’s instant popularity upon the Starz adaptation’s debut in 2014.
As the historical fiction series enters its eighth and final season, showrunner Matthew B. Roberts and executive producer Maril Davis can still recall their plea to move away from the sacred text that is Gabaldon’s best selling book series.
“If Diana didn’t want us to do something, we certainly wouldn’t go down that path. And that’s happened before.” Roberts recently explained in an exclusive interview with SYFY Wire. “Early days, there were some things that we thought we might want to do. She’s like, ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’”
Like, Davis noted, “keeping Black Jack alive.”
The perennial foe of Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) and Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe) met his end during the season two finale, “Dragonfly in Amber,” a victim of the real-life Battle of Culloden.
Menzies, who also plays Claire’s present-day husband Frank Randall, proved too good at playing bad as he hit the ground running once cast in creator Ronald D. Moore’s take on the Scottish highlands saga.
“He was fantastic. The character jumped off the screen. You don’t think it’s going to be that amazing, and it’s 10 times more amazing,” Roberts said. “So, of course, we were thinking about doing that and she said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ so we didn’t.”
Like George R. R. Martin and HBO’s Game of Thrones series, Gabaldon was forced to reckon with the TV show catching up to the literary timeline, with season eight adapting novel number nine Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone. Meanwhile, Gabaldon is still putting pen to paper with the final installment of Jamie and Claire’s centuries-spanning love story, A Blessing for a Warrior Going Out.
Even though the text and TV endings could end up looking a little different, the show’s writers are more than a decade into trusting Gabaldon to champion what’s best for both stories.
“Diane’s been with us since day one. She knows where all the storylines are going. Not only do we pitch her, she’s involved,” Roberts shared. “Throughout the years, we’ve always said, ‘Hey, this is where we have to go a different way.’ ‘We don’t have a character.’ ‘We don’t have the setting.’ We let her know what our thoughts are, and then she lets us know her thoughts.”
Season eight of Outlander premieres March 6 on Starz, followed by new episodes debuting Fridays on the Starz app and all Starz streaming and on-demand platforms.
Source: https://www.yahoo.com/
