Outlander’s Richard Rankin explores Roger’s trauma

Outlander has been tumultuous for our ‘ol Roger MacKenzie lately. He fell in love with Brianna Fraser in his own time, but had no idea where that love would take him, or rather when. Now, between Brianna’s rape and now his near-death experience in the most recent episode, Roger is basically at his wit’s end. Outlander star Richard Rankin spoke to Entertainment Weekly about his character’s journey thus far, and how the latest incident has completely pushed him over the edge.

As we saw in “Famous Last Words,” Roger survived his hanging by the Regulators, but he isn’t the man he once was. Rankin explained what’s going on in Roger’s mind following this traumatic event:

"Well it’s depression, mostly. The post-traumatic stress. There are many things going on. He’s also been at a real breaking point. There’s a lot for him to overcome. He’s trying to find the man that he once was, and I think one of his conclusions, one of the things he has to arrive at is the fact that that guy is gone. He has to come to terms with the fact that for better or worse, he is a changed man. [The hanging] was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. This whole 18th century journey has just been weighing on him so much. This is it."

Over the course of Outlander, we’ve seen Roger in many different lights, and he hasn’t always been a fan favorite. Mindful of this, “Famous Last Words” was very careful in the way it depicted his plight:

"There was so much going on in Episode 508, trying to get that right, trying to tell that story without seeming mopey. The scenes could have played out in quite a negative way for Roger. We want to get a sense that deep down he wants to get through this, he wants to overcome these obstacles. But every time he tries something, it sort of smacks him in the face. So it’s difficult. But we want everyone in the audience to feel that as much as he does — the fact that he’s been stripped of everything that he is, everything he was."

Perhaps Roger’s biggest loss was his voice, something we’ve heard a whole lot of through the course of this season. “His voice was such a big thing for Roger because he was an auditor, a singer, a musician,” Rankin said. “One of his strongest characteristics is communication. Words are such an important thing to him, and he can’t even speak or sing to his son. I think he just feels like he’s been stripped of everything that he was. So it goes to a really, really dark place.”

I think many of us were wondering if having Roger sing so much through the first half of the season was a deliberate choice. Was it to remind us how important his voice is to him so we would feel it when it was taken away? “That wasn’t the talk with me,” Rankin said. “I don’t know if that was the talk amongst the upper echelons. There was a lot of singing, so it had crossed my mind that we were cramming in as much music as we could because they were going to crush my vocal cords. So I had thought of it that.”

And what lies ahead for Roger now?

"There’s a whole bunch of different things going on that is going to carry with him throughout the rest of his journey through Outlander, certainly throughout the rest of season five. It’s complex, but trying to keep that contained in a way that we can deliver that to the audience."

I’ve always been on the fence about Roger as a character, but I’m intrigued by his current storyline. I think I’ve always viewed him as a passive guy, and even when he does make grand gestures, they somehow get lost in translation. But after this incident, I think we are going to see a very different side of Roger, and it’s going to change how we view him as a person, man, husband and father.

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