In a recent episode of Outlander Season 7, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) attempts to initiate sex with her long-time love Jamie (Sam Heughan) and then immediately stops. She’s trying to bury her grief over losing tabs with daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton), son-in-law Roger (Richard Rankin), and grandchildren Jemmy and Mandy with sex, but it’s not working. Later in the season, the two do make love, but it’s all PG shots of them rolling around in bed. Gone are the days when Claire and Jamie would just go at it in broad daylight on the Scottish highlands. No more are we getting kinky knife play or nonstop orgasms. The magical sex on Outlander that could heal a man and save a soul doesn’t seem to have the spark it once had.
Although Claire and Jamie’s love is still as profoundly strong as ever, it seems that their sex life has cooled down in Outlander Season 7. According to Outlander star Caitriona Balfe, that’s a good thing.
“What really is evolving is these two characters and this marriage,” Balfe told Decider. “You know, we’re talking 30 years later. It would be highly, I think, unreal and unrealistic if they still had the same kind of first passion that they had.”
“This is something that’s grown over time, it has deepened, it has evolved. They are no less passionate, but it’s just in a different form.”
Long time Outlander executive producer Maril Davis agreed that Jamie and Claire’s romance has undergone an “evolution” before explaining that sometimes they can’t tackle specific intimate scenes from Diana Gabaldon’s books because of production concerns.
“There are a couple iconic [sex] scenes I think people will miss [in Season 7], but that was logistics. Our locations don’t always want to play along with our storyline,” Davis said, before adding that now they loop an intimacy coordinator into the planning of those scenes. It’s a resource they didn’t have in the early days of Outlander.
“When we started this, it was all new and fresh, and we were doing something really new,” Davis said. “We still like to push the boundaries, but it’s just in different ways.”
Outlander star Sam Heughan told Decider that he definitely has noticed a difference on set with an intimacy coordinator.
“I think when we started, we were honestly kind of thrown in, I think, a little bit in the deep end and we just had to figure it out ourselves. And it’s great that the industry has changed, and we have a lot more support,” Heughan said before shouting out their current intimacy coordinator, Vanessa Coffey.
“She just makes it not only safe for everyone, but it helps us explore these scenes and maybe help us get more out of them, right? To explore what intimacy is for these two characters.”
So if you’re wondering what happened to the hardcore horny scenes from the early seasons of Outlander, they weren’t ruined by the introduction of intimacy coordinators. The intimacy coordinators are not to blame! Claire and Jamie just aren’t the horndogs they were in 1740s Scotland. They are, however, still madly in love.
