‘Outlander’ Sam Heughan in the series finale.Credit: 

Starz

Sam Heughan’s beloved Outlander character, Jamie Fraser, went from his 50s back to his 20s in Friday’s series finale, but it wasn’t any kind of technical feat.

“They needed a lot of work to get me to that young,” the actor jokingly tells Entertainment Weekly in a conversation with his costar Caitríona Balfe, showrunner Matthew B. Roberts, and executive producer Maril Davis.

He explained that, in fact, the scenes were not held back from the first season: “It’s a lot of makeup.”

Balfe, who played the love interest of Heughan’s character for eight seasons, reassured him that he “looked very young.”

He sweetly replied, “Thank you, darling.”

Now 46, Heughan played a character in his early 20s when the series began in 2014.

“That just shows you,” Davis said, “I think we weather Sam a lot during shooting and his natural” look is quite good.

Roberts noted that what had actually aged was the scenery.

The time-hopping show, based on the book series of the same name from author Diana Gabaldon, wrapped up Friday with the episode “And the World Was All Around Us.”

The end of the show, however, is up for interruption, with both Heughan and Balfe admitting they don’t totally understand if Jamie and Claire were reunited.

“There was, I believe, an element of Claire having a power. It goes back to her being la dame blanche, this white witch,” he says. “She brings the child back to life earlier. There’s the Faith of it all. Her hair changes color using her special ability. But I think they changed their minds on quite how that was going to play out. In my head, or the way I’m interpreting it, is it’s really up to the fans, whether they’re alive again together. They’re, of course, always together. But are they alive in this world or in the next? I’d like to believe that they’re alive together. I think them even waking up on the standing stone itself might signify that perhaps they’re somewhere else.”

Balfe had a similar take.

“I just saw it the other day, and I’ve only seen it once, so it’s hard to process something like that,” the actress tells EW. “I thought the whole battle sequence was all very exciting and dramatic and really cool. It’s so heartbreaking for Claire, obviously, when she feels [Jamie’s] dead. I’m not sure that I fully understand the ending. I don’t really know what happened, but I thought it was really cool that they went and did the Jamie ghost thing again, and that in some way, maybe, he was calling her, or he pulled her into his orbit. But as to what happens when they’re lying on the stone, I don’t know.”