“I went in for a costume fitting before I’d seen any scripts, and hung up on the rail was a [redacted because it’s a spoiler!] and a straitjacket. So yeah, I knew something funny was going on,” Irvine says, chuckling. “I didn’t have a clue where it was going. Knew that it wasn’t going to be the 1700s, anyway.”

“Blood of My Blood,” a prequel to Starz’s massively popular “Outlander,” chronicles the love stories of the parents of Jamie Fraser and his wife, Claire Beauchamp. The Beauchamp half of the series started off with Irvine’s Henry and his wife, Julia (played by Hermione Corfield), accidentally traveling through time to the 1800s during a holiday in Scotland — much like their daughter would do years later in the original series. Julia wound up as a servant to, and then wife of, the sleazy Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat (Tony Curran). Henry, who’d been led to believe Julia and the child she was carrying had died, was pressed into service as an adviser to the influential Grant family.

After Henry learned that his wife and son were actually alive and well, the Beauchamps had a happy reunion and ran to the mystical circle of standing stones they hoped would send them back to the 1920s. But the situation turned chaotic when Grant thugs approached, looking to drag Henry back to his post. In the end, as the recently released Season 2 trailer revealed, only Henry slipped through the stones — leaving Julia and the baby in the past.

‘Henry just gets tortured by the writers in every episode’

Courtesy of Starz
The twist shakes up the story, which for the majority of the first season took place in the 1700s. “We are a time-travel show and we want to keep that alive, remind people coming to the show that, ‘Hey… people do time-travel on this show,” showrunner Matthew B. Roberts tells TVLine.

Which brings us back to those costumes Irvine mentioned. While we can’t tell you what was dangling from that other hanger, the trailer offers some context for the straitjacket: Henry’s trip will land him at a psychiatric facility in an era when electroconvulsive therapy is a go-to treatment. (More on that in our Fall TV Preview 2026!) And given that Henry’s mental health already took a huge hit courtesy of his service in World War I, is it any wonder that he enters Season 2 in extremely rough shape?

“Henry just gets tortured by the writers in every episode in this show,” Jeremy Irvine jokes. “I shouldn’t have been surprised.” Lending verisimilitude to the performance: Irvine and his wife, Jodie Spencer, had twins two weeks into filming the show’s sophomore run. (“I was just a zombie,” he says.)

Julia ‘really hits her rock bottom’

Courtesy of Starz
That’s not to imply that Julia has it any easier by getting left behind. Suddenly stripped of her soulmate, she has no other option than to continue the ruse she constructed to protect her and her son: pretending to be devoted to Lovat, whom she has led to believe is William’s father. Meanwhile, she has no clue where Henry has ended up — and she fears the worst.

“One of the things I spoke to [premiere director Azhur Saleem] about was if that was Julia’s rock bottom,” Hermione Corfield tells TVLine. “The whole of the first season, she and Henry are working up to escaping. They finally, in that last episode, get away from Lovat, get away from the Grants, and they’re ready to go through.” When Henry disappears, “Her world collapses,” she previews. “She’s been putting on a brave face, and just keeps moving forward, keeps moving with that positive attitude. And then, when it goes wrong, I think that’s the first time she really can’t.”

So by the time Mrs. Beauchamp is back at Castle Leathers, sitting across the dinner table from her drunk and vengeful husband-of-necessity, “the idea of being back to square one for her is too much,” Corfield continues. “She really hits her rock bottom… At that point, she’s really hit a wall.”
That low point will have ramifications as the episodes progress. “She’s much less in control this season. She’s been pushed to the brink, and so she’s in a state of desperation,” Hermione Corfield says. “She’s a logical person. She turns to logic and reason. In the second season, her logic and reason have been completely shaken, and she feels completely untethered and on uneven ground. She’s lost some of her carefulness.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Corfield says the Season 2 premiere’s story sent a wee ripple of playful jealousy through her. “I got that first script, and I was like, ‘I can’t believe it,’” she recalls, laughing. “I was like aww! Selfishly, I wanted to go traveling to different time zones!”

“Outlander: Blood of My Blood” returns for Season 2 on Friday, September 18, at 8/7c (Starz). Until then, make sure to catch all of our pre-season coverage, and hit the comments with your predictions for the season ahead!