‘You Learn the Hard Way’

NEED TO KNOW

• There was no intimacy coordinator on set first few seasons of Outlander, Caitríona Balfe recalled in a new interview

• She said she and her costars, Sam Heughan and Tobias Menzies, were all “very nervous about the amount of sex scenes,” and that anxiety grew alongside an “expectation and an appetite” for the Starz series to have a lot of steamy scenes

• “You learn the hard way, maybe, how to protect yourself a bit more,” Balfe said of filming those moments on the show

The early seasons of Outlander were the “Wild West” for stars Caitríona Balfe and Sam Heughan.

The Starz series established during its first season, which premiered in 2014, that steamy moments would be a key part of the love story between Claire (Balfe) and Jamie (Heughan). The reality of filming those scenes, though, became something of a challenge for the actors despite the fandom they generated for the show.

“We were very nervous about the amount of sex scenes,” Balfe told Bustle on an episode of the One Nightstand podcast released on Tuesday, March 31. “I had never done anything like that, I don’t think Sam had, I know Tobias [Menzies] hadn’t. And so it was very new territory for all of us, but [showrunner] Ron [Moore] was like, ‘I really want these to be part of the storytelling.’ And that was our directive in the beginning.”

“As it went on, it got harder to maintain that directive because, if you become known for something, then people have an expectation and an appetite for it,” Balfe, 46, said. “What we were really trying to do is like, ‘Look, we’re going to show you a beautiful, intimate relationship, but it’s not always going to be about sex.’ “

“And there’s pressures — they come from the studio, or they come from the audience — and you’re an actor, you’re a human being. It’s not [the] first thing that I want to do is take my clothes off,” she continued. The fans’ demand for sex scenes “became an interesting challenge” for her and Heughan, 45.

Their goal with Claire and Jamie, however, was to “show you a loving, passionate marriage that ages and that deepens and that grows over time, and that’s not always gonna be about lust.”

The lack of intimacy coordinators on the show added yet another layer to that challenge. “We were in the early days, which was like the Wild West. I wish we’d had [them],” Balfe said.

“I think we learned along the way some of the pitfalls. I was so lucky that both Sam and Tobias … that we were all such good friends and really were able to look out for each other,” she said of her costars.

The actress added that in “the beginning, yeah, it was — not always knowing what was being filmed, how it was being filmed, and then later on, you’re just watching screenshots and memes, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, my poor parents.’ And you learn the hard way, maybe, how to protect yourself a bit more.”

She credited Heughan and the bond they’ve developed over the course of the show — on-screen and off — for how she handled some of their earliest steamy moments.

“I feel like I had the most amazing work partner in Sam, and he and I are such good friends, and we always had each other’s backs,” she said. “It was very important for us that [the sex scenes] didn’t become gratuitous and that it wasn’t just about sort of feeding an audience what they think they want, but more what’s going to move them.”

This is not the first time that Balfe or Heughan have spoken out about their concerns over a lack of an intimacy coordinator being on set. In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actress recalled how they had “been put in a position where it was [Sam] and I really deciding what was going to be in the scenes. It’s a constant negotiation between the director and the producers and how much do the producers want versus how much we feel comfortable with.”

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“So, instead of focusing on what the characters were doing in the scenes, you had to go through this whole advocation for ourselves and be like, ‘Well, I don’t really want you to show this much.’ It’s never comfortable conversations, and sometimes it can cause tensions,” she continued at the time.

It wasn’t until season 6 of the series that an intimacy coordinator was hired. “I brought on board the intimacy advisor Vanessa Coffey because, with intimate scenes, it’s important that everyone is protected, but also we find a way to explore these scenes and actually maybe get something more out of them,” Heughan said on Happy Sad Confused podcast in 2022.

“It’s amazing what they do. I think it’s to protect everybody,” Balfe said on the One Nightstand podcast. “It was interesting, ’cause Sam and I, obviously, at that point, had such a history, and so it was like, ‘Oh, well, we’ve sorta got this.’ And then you realize that like, ‘Oh no, [Vanessa] brings this whole other layer to it.’ “

New episodes of Outlander season 8 air Fridays on Starz.

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