So much so that it turns out Roy originally auditioned for the flagship series, only for producers to decide they needed to save him for Blood of my Blood, on which Roy now portrays Brian Fraser, the father of Heughan’s Jamie.
History repeated itself in the casting process with the team finding Roy first, just as they had with Heughan over a decade ago. “We had actually started to cast him for a role in Outlander,” revealed showrunner Maril Davis on a Blood of my Blood panel at Comic-Con. “All the writers and I were like, ‘Wow, he looks a lot like Sam. That’s so weird. Maybe we should hold him for the prequel.'”
There was only one problem — Blood of my Blood had yet to be greenlit by the network. “We were like, ‘Who knows what’s gonna happen? Maybe we’ll cast him,'” Davis recalled. “Then, I was talking to Karen Bailey [the senior vice president of original programming at Starz], and she was like, ‘God, he looks a lot like Sam. Should we save him for the prequel?’ So, here we are.”
Roy did, however, have the opportunity to meet Heughan and chat with his on-screen son to get a sense of him up close and personal. They met for a coffee, which Roy said swiftly turned into multiple whiskeys.
But apart from that natural resemblance, Roy wasn’t looking to recreate any of Heughan’s performance. “[Showrunner Matthew B. Roberts] didn’t want a carbon copy of Jamie,” Roy said during the panel. “Because, obviously, he’s the combination of his two parents. We really wanted Brian to be his own man, which was great because it freed me from any expectations or pressures. I could find Brian naturally.”
“The casting team have done such a wonderful job,” he continued. “We all do share characteristics with the people who played the older versions of ourselves. I didn’t really study Sam’s performance as much, but I’ve been told we’re quite similar in personalities. Our characters are both quite brave, romantic, and very handsome.” The last bit he said with a wink.
Roy isn’t the only member of the Blood of my Blood cast who almost booked a gig on Outlander first. Hermione Corfield, who portrays Claire’s mother Julia Moriston, originally auditioned to play Brianna, Jamie and Claire’s daughter, a role which ultimately went to Sophie Skelton. “I was 21 , 22,” Corfield tells Entertainment Weekly. “I was going to screen test for Brianna, and then it ended up clashing with another job, so I couldn’t do it.”
It speaks to how much Corfield also resembles and embodies characteristics that belong to Balfe, if she was being considered for the role of Claire’s daughter at first.
Davis said that quality is consistent across the board with the prequel cast. “Everyone here has something about them that embodies the original character,” she reflected. “They’ve just stepped in and made it their own.”
