Wizard World: Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe and Diana Gabaldon

Droughtlander has not broken yet – but Caitriona Balfe and Diana Gabaldon‘s panel at Wizard World Convention in Chicago yesterday makes us feel like the end is in sight. Balfe, who plays Claire Fraser on the hit show Outlander, and Gabaldon, author of the beloved book series, shared some details about bringing the story and characters to life, starting their careers, and why women can’t resist a man in a kilt.

Caitriona on getting cast in Outlander:

• Though Caitriona Balfe studied acting in Dublin, she left school to become a model after an agent spotted her raising money for charity at a grocery story. She spent the next 10 years living and working in Paris and New York City but never lost the acting bug: “I was starting to get towards 30 and was like, ‘If I don’t do this now, I never will.’ So I moved to LA and I just started taking [acting] classes, and one teacher introduced me to a manager, and then I started going on auditions with little bits of jobs. But it wasn’t until they optioned Outlander— obviously this has been my huge, big break, and it’s been a wild and wonderful ride. I have this woman [Diana Gabaldon] to thank for everything.”
• She bought her copy of Outlander from Book Soup in West Hollywood, her favorite book store.
• After being cast as Claire, Balfe had less than a week to relocate to Scotland: “From the time I found out I got the job, they wanted me in Scotland 3 days later. I managed to get two extra days because I had a cat, a car, and an apartment– I needed to pack all of those things. So it was just so quick and in many ways it served the story well because Claire was just thrown into this world, as was I.”
• Balfe prepared for her role by researching the 1940s, not the 18th century: “That was Claire’s world.”

Diana Gabaldon on becoming a writer, creating Outlander, and loving men in kilts:

• Gabaldon had always wanted to be a novelist but became a research professor because she thought it would be a more secure profession. But, like Balfe, she couldn’t quit the call to be an artist: “When I turned 35 I said, ‘Well, Mozart was dead at 36, maybe you should get a move on it, just in case. By my next birthday, I’ll write a novel, just to learn how.’ The basic truth here is that you can take all the writing classes you want to, but it won’t teach you how to write. Nothing teaches you how to write except the act of writing.”
• She decided to write historical fiction because “it seems easier to look things up than to make them up, and if I turn out to have no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record.”
• A fortuitous episode of Doctor Who planted the seed of Jamie Fraser: “I saw a really old Doctor Who rerun in which he had picked up a young Scotsman from 1745. This was a young man in his early 20s who was in his kilt. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of fetching.’ […] So that’s where I began, knowing nothing about Scotland or the 18th century, having no plot, no outline, and no characters– just the rather vague images conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt.”
• Why was the kilt so attractive? “I suppose it’s the idea that you could be up against a wall with him in a minute.”
• Her husband is always her first reader: “He’s the only person who reads the books while I’m writing them. […] He gets up way early, and I work way late. So I leave the finished scene on his sink when I go to bed. He’ll take it out and read it over his morning coffee and come back for lunch and tell me what he thought about it.”

Spilling some tea about Season 4:

• Caitriona Balfe’s favorite scene to film was an action sequence alongside costar Sam Heughan and First Nations Canadians: “We obviously had a large group come from Canada of First Nations Canadians who were amazing, and such lovely, funny people. We all got along really well.”
• Though Season 4 is largely set in colonial North Carolina, they filmed in it Scotland. According to Balfe, “Because a lot of Scotland looks like North Carolina, we were doing a lot of in-forest acting, that’s safe to say. It’s a lot of trees.”
• Balfe was able to explore news shades of her beloved character: “It’s a constant evolution. The minute you think you know the character, something else happens and you explore a different side of them. This season was very much that. I think it’s a completely different side of Claire. In the beginning I was like, ‘What the hell has happened to my character?!’ But then you realize this is another side, and there is a value to exploring all these other sides. Actually what it does is deepen your understanding of the character and the story, because it would be boring to play the same thing season after season.”
• Balfe loves the romantic, balanced core of Claire and Jamie’s story: “They push each other to be the best versions of themselves. They save each other. They annoy each other sometimes; but it’s a true marriage. You have these real, multi-dimensional characters, and I think that’s what makes it such a balanced view of a relationship, just because it’s not one [character] dominating the other.”

Their favorite moments in the show thus far:

• Caitriona Balfe claims that her favorite episode to act was in Season 2: “One of the most beautiful storylines I’ve been able to tell has been the ‘Faith’ episode.” (Us too! That was one of our favorite moments from Season 2.)
• Diana Gabaldon loved the darkest and most violent episode in the whole series: “My favorite overall was episode 16 of Season 1, which I know will not be a popular choice. I was not lying when I told Sam Heughan, ‘I want to see you raped and tortured.’ And he did it fabulously.”

Their least favorite moments in the show thus far:

• Balfe has a strong sense of Claire as a multi-dimensional, strong, and confident woman, so she resists moments when those attributes are undermined: “I did not love the slapping of Laoghaire. I feel Claire would not be threatened [by her]. She has Jamie. She is a woman, [Laoghaire] is a young girl. That’s one scene I fought till the bitter end. But I lost that battle, so it was in the show.”
• Gabaldon’s least favorite moment was in Season 4, but they fortunately cut the scene.

Diana Gabaldon on her involvement with the television show:

• The production and creative team keeps Gabaldon in the loop pretty much every step of the way: “They show me all of the footage as they go along, and they actually solicit my opinion, and sometimes they listen to me.”
• Gabaldon sometimes corrects the show or points out problems with historical details, but she ultimately lets the team make their own decisions.

Celebrities they’d most like to meet at a fan convention:

• Caitriona Balfe would geek out over Sir Patrick Stewart.
• Diana Gabaldon loves William Shatner, even though she has already met him.

The book that has had the biggest impact on them:

• Caitriona Balfe cites Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as her “all-time favorite” book.
• Diana Gabaldon loves Alice in Wonderland and Lonesome Dove. Her husband pointed out that the authors of these books “both subscribe to the ‘one damn thing after another’ school of fiction,” just like she does.

Wizard World Chicago has plenty more Outlander moments this weekend! Follow along as we find out more from the rest of the cast!