DAVID BERRY has spent close to a decade wearing someone else’s hair.

As Lord John Grey in Outlander, the Starz series has fuelled the fantasies of period drama fans for the past eight years, the Sydney-raised actor has built a career on a character so embedded in detail that it took until the show’s penultimate season for Berry to finally appear on screen in his own.

“Those wigs are surprisingly expensive,” he tells Esquire. “[For the past seven years] I’ve been wearing something that cost the equivalent of a used car on my head – thousands and thousands of dollars. It wasn’t until season seven that I had my own hair.”

It is, in its way, a fitting metaphor for a role that is defined by what it conceals in plain sight. His character, Lord John Grey is a gay man navigating 18th-century Britain, a soldier and diplomat who has learned to express almost everything except what he actually feels. For Berry, that tension is precisely what has kept the character interesting across a decade of filming.

“He can’t really operate within his own simple truth,” Berry says. “He has to hide behind masks due to the given circumstances of his time, and because he can’t be his true self, we’re never quite sure what he’s thinking. Lord John can’t express how he feels about Jamie, or how he feels as a gay man in the 1700s, which adds a lot of dimension and joy in playing the character.”

Berry came to the role with no prior knowledge of the hit Diana Gabaldon novels, a fact he now regards as something of an advantage. Fan expectation could have been paralysing – the books carry a devoted readership who can spot a fake Fraser tartan a mile off – but Berry’s ignorance gave him room to move.

“I came in completely ignorant and then people receiving the character so well emboldened me to just go with my instincts,” he says. What surprised him was how naturally the character arrived. “In the audition, he’s like a character I felt I’d known forever.”

Over eight seasons, that instinct has crystalised into something more complex. Berry describes Lord John as a man who possesses every tool of conventional masculinity – military competence, skill with a sword and able fighter – yet consistently chooses not to use them.

“He chooses to use his heart and his kindness to solve conflict,” Berry says. “I’m drawn to characters that show their strength through vulnerability and compassion. And I think that has nothing to do with sexuality at all.”

It is a conviction that shapes how Berry thinks about the broader television landscape. He points to the success of Heartstopper and Heated Rivalry as evidence that gay narratives no longer need to justify their mainstream appeal.

“Audiences really do respond to authentic and well-produced love stories, it doesn’t matter the gender or the sexuality,” he says. “We’ve moved on from the prejudices that have inhibited us from really engaging with those narratives.”

Berry never thought of himself as an actor growing up, though the evidence was always there. Raised with three siblings, he was a fixture in the household dress-up box, putting on plays organised largely by his sisters. Alongside that came a serious early involvement with music, including professional productions with Opera Australia.

“Now I look back and I’m like, oh yeah, it makes sense how I got here,” he says. “But I never really thought of myself as an actor at the time. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

After eight years, Outlander is now nearing the end of its current incarnation. Does Berry feel a sense of loss for the man whose persona – and hair – he has worn and come to know on a truly intimate level?

“It’s a really difficult transition moment coming off a show that’s been running for eight years,” he explains. “In many ways, it’s come to define me in some ways, and the struggle now is to find other ways and forge new ground and new opportunities.”

As an actor, Berry confesses that in many ways stability is a trade-off for novelty and adventure.

“It’s a constant difficulty in finding those new things and new ways to explore and define yourself. So novelty is definitely part of what attracts me. So I would love to explore something completely new, something in a contemporary time period, something that is more within my own voice or closer to me.”

So what comes next, Berry genuinely open. The industry has contracted sharply since Berry started out, and he is candid about the realities of that.

“I’m not in a position to say, ‘I will do theatre or I will do movies’, as if I have a luxury of choice,” he says. What he does know is that he wants material that sits closer to himself.

“Early in my career, I was more drawn to roles where I could hide behind stuff. As I’m getting older, I feel more comfortable in my own skin.”

There is also the matter of Lord John’s considerable literary afterlife.

Gabaldon’s spin-off series gives the character a rich existence beyond the events of Outlander, and Berry is not ruling anything out.

“I will always save a space for that potentiality,” he says.