Outlander’s Sophie Skelton & Richard Rankin: “We’ve gone though everything a human could go through”
Starz
Outlander’s Sophie Skelton & Richard Rankin on Time Travel Trauma, Fraser’s Ridge, and Finally Finding Peace
There’s a point somewhere around season four of Outlander where the show quietly stops being just a time-travel romance and turns into something else entirely. A survival story. A family saga. A weekly exercise in seeing just how much emotional and physical damage one group of people can absorb before somebody gets kidnapped by history again.
Which brings us to Sophie Skelton and Richard Rankin, who’ve spent nearly a decade carrying Brianna and Roger MacKenzie through wars, kidnappings, hangings, Mohawk captivity, religious crises, and enough temporal whiplash to make most people swear off standing stones forever.
Now, with season eight looming as the possible final chapter of Outlander, both actors sound a little stunned themselves that they made it this far.
“Brianna’s been through pretty much everything a human could go through,” Skelton says with a laugh that sounds only partially joking. “So it’s always wonderful when they find new ways to put our characters through something instead of recycling things we’ve done before.”
That’s the thing about Outlander. Every season starts with the vague hope that maybe this year everyone can just settle down at Fraser’s Ridge, make bread, raise children, and avoid historical catastrophe for five minutes. Then somebody gets dragged into another century or nearly dies in a field.
Season eight picks up with Jamie and Claire back home, though “home” in this universe is usually just another word for “the place where the next disaster happens.” Family secrets bubble up. The Revolutionary War still hangs in the air. Fraser’s Ridge itself starts feeling like a pressure cooker.
For Skelton, though, this final stretch gave Brianna something she hadn’t fully had before: confidence. “When we came onto this, we knew these characters had a lot of growth based on the books,” she says. “Even when we auditioned, we had sides from season four, which obviously wasn’t written yet. So I kind of knew that I had to give Brianna somewhere to go.”
Back then, Brianna arrived as somebody younger, unsure of herself, still trying to understand who she was inside this impossible world her parents had dropped her into. Season eight finds her standing differently. “This is probably my favorite version of Brianna,” Skelton says. “I feel like she’s finally come into her own.”
Roger’s journey has been even stranger, which is saying something on a show where people routinely fall through rocks into different centuries. But Roger’s real struggle was never just survival. It was purpose. “He’s always been trying to find his place and where he belongs and how he fits,” Rankin explains. “I think he knows he fits with his family wherever he is. But he’s always looking to be as much use as he can be in any given time.”
Which becomes a complicated existential problem when you’re literally a historian who accidentally becomes part of history. “His thing was history,” Rankin says. “And then once he became part of history, things became a bit more challenging in terms of what his purpose was.”
What’s kept Outlander going for this long, beyond the romance and battle scenes and aggressively attractive Scottish scenery, is the way the characters evolve under pressure. Nobody stays frozen in place. Trauma leaves dents. Love changes shape. Faith gets questioned. People age emotionally even when the wigs occasionally refuse to cooperate.
And after nearly ten years together, the cast itself seems to have gone through a similar transformation. “The cast became much closer in the last year or two,” Rankin says. “That made it a little more difficult to say goodbye.”
Skelton jumps in immediately when asked what Rankin will miss most. “Me.”
That lands exactly like you’d hope after a decade of playing one television’s most battle-tested couples.
“I mean, she’s not far wrong,” Rankin admits.
The end of a long-running series always comes with the weird balancing act of closure versus possibility. Outlander fans already know there’s another book still coming from Diana Gabaldon, which means “final season” carries a tiny asterisk attached to it. Even the producers are careful not to completely shut the door.
But whatever happens next, season eight feels aware of the weight it’s carrying. Not just wrapping up storylines, but saying goodbye to characters audiences have lived alongside for over a decade.
And maybe that’s the strange trick Outlander pulled off all these years. Beneath the wars, kidnappings, and timeline chaos, it became a show about trying to hold onto the people you love while history keeps dragging everybody somewhere else.
Source: lpm.org/music
