Under Kilt

Meet your brand-new Scottish delight (sorry, Walkers Shortbread): 34-year-old Sam Heughan stars as hunky warrior Jamie Fraser into the upcoming Starz crisis debuting Aug. 9 at 9 p.m. on the basis of the bestselling book series by Diana Gabaldon, the version follows English former army nursing assistant Claire Randall as she mysteriously moves back in its history from 1945 to 18th-century Scotland. Her main ally within unknown land is the strapping young Jamie, just who visits great aches (literally!) to help keep her safe…and satisfied.

EW talked with Heughan—just days before their first Comic-Con—about the pressures of portraying such a beloved character, Outlander training, and whether he wears their kilt the “traditional” Scottish way.

EW: had been you knowledgeable about the Outlander show before you decide to auditioned for the part of Jamie?
SAM HEUGHAN: I'dn’t been aware of it. Obviously, once I learned it was a book, I went out and bought the guide. I had to audition over a weekend, and additionally they delivered myself many pages to learn. But I moved and see the specific scenes and got a rough notion of which this guy was. And clearly whenever I got recalled and moved set for display tests, we were able to really read the guide. Having all of that supply product there was actually helpful. It’s been great to dip into the book if we have to.

Clearly both you and Jamie tend to be both Scottish, but I don’t know where similarities begin and end. Did you feel like this part might be perfect for you?
Yeah, i must state it will type of experience a little like this. It simply felt right. I’d simply gotten right back from la. I’d already been over here for pilot period, and this was an opportunity to go back to my residence country and be in which I went to crisis school in Glasgow. It simply thought appropriate. I happened to be born and brought up within the country side. I accustomed reside in a kind of converted stables on the grounds of a castle, and I spent plenty of my childhood playing around with a pretend blade pretending to Robert the Bruce. So yeah, it’s kind of absolutely a childhood fantasy.

You had been training the role even before you understood!
[Laughs] Exactly, yeah.

You have a fairly eclectic resume. You’ve done soaps, you’ve done theater…and you're Batman in a touring manufacturing?
Yeah, I became. I did that perhaps two years ago now. It had been a great job. It was with DC Comics and Warner Bros., therefore was an arena show. We went along to the Staples Center in L.A. We did Vegas. We moved all over the globe. We did South America, European countries, plus it was like a huge play on phase. There was clearly in addition pyrotechnics, and I performed a lot of traveling and fighting, and it actually was like a fantastic comic book on stage.

You’re no stranger into real material, then, but we imagine you had to complete at the least some education to get involved with the physicality and headspace of Jamie.
To start with, they got me personally a trainer, and he emerged right down to London therefore we were training 2 or 3 times each and every day for six-weeks. Only attempting to pack on a bit of weight and some muscle tissue because we decided which he needed seriously to appear to be he could take care of himself. He’s a farmer, he’s call at the industries, he works a whole lot. But we didn’t desire him to look very muscular or like he’d held it's place in a gym or everything. So that it ended up being almost getting more actual because we knew this would be a really physical component.

And we came up to Scotland, and then we had a-two week Outlander boot camp in which we performed a lot of horse riding. We started learning Gaelic for show, besides. There’s countless blade fighting—sort of taking care of Jamie’s style, just how he fights. And therefore’s sort of, I think, for which you start to get knowledge of this character occurs when you begin to look at costumes and workout exactly how he’s planning to hold himself, the way in which he walks, and in addition where he ties in the clan utilizing the various other clan users. Therefore it was an extremely essential little while in which we reached meet up with the remaining cast and simply type of see where your personality ties in together with them.