Outlander: Blood of my Blood season 2 has officially kicked off on Starz (US) and MGM+ (international)… and boy, is it off to an explosive start.

Alongside some great Easter eggs (IYKYK), we’ve picked the action back up with Claire and Jamie’s parents: Brian (Jamie Roy), Ellen (Harriet Slater), Julia (Hermione Corfield), and Henry (Jeremy Irvine).

The lovers are separated once again as the Scottish Highlands are split in two by the 1715 Jacobite Rising in season 2, with Julia and Henry split when their plan to travel back to the 1920s goes wrong at the last minute.

It was brutal, but somehow Henry has found himself in a psychiatric asylum in 1924, while Julia stays trapped in 1715… with no idea what’s happened or how to fix it.

We see Henry undergo electric shock therapy after it’s revealed that he was found on the street by a local policeman, incoherently babbling about time travel enough to cause concern.

It’s a brutal scene to watch, but how was it to film? Irvine gives us a full breakdown… and it might actually have been worse than it looked.
‘It really jumps in at the deep end’
“It’s great. I got to do a load of research into something that I didn’t know much about,” Irvine tells me. “I’d watched some footage of people having it done, and that was a good excuse to sort of really jump in at the deep end… go for quite a big performance and um, see if we got away with it.”

If you ask me, it certainly does. As I tell Irvine, season 2 episode 1 largely feels less like Outlander and more like an episode of American Horror Story or Ratched. For the tonal shift alone, I’m hooked — there’s nothing like keeping us on our toes right from the get-go.

“I remember it being exhausting to film,” he continues. I think I basically had a seizure for two days on a gurney. I really enjoyed the wacky way they went inside Henry’s mind. I think that it’s the part of the character that I enjoy playing the most, his fragile mental state and his warped view on reality.

“It’s a great obstacle for him to have to try and work through. It’s unsettling for me to watch back, which I think is a good, good thing.”

If you’ve been following my Blood of my Blood coverage since season 1, you might remember that Irvine told me shortly after starting production that season 2 would be “wildly not what we expect.” But now that we’re all seeing it, were the actors as surprised when the drama picked back up?

“I remember before I read the scripts, I went for a costume fitting and had a vicar’s outfit and a straitjacket to try on… that’s when my suspicions were first aroused,” Irvine adds. “For Henry, it’s a completely different world to go into, which is great.

“We filmed episode 1 in that first month, which was nice because you don’t always get to film in order. It was great to see how everybody just came back and hit the ground running pretty much from that first step.”

But if you think this means that things are slowly down from episode 2 onwards, think again.

Source: Compiled from various sources.