Sam Heughan explores Jamie and Claire’s “most intimate” moment yet

Sam Heughan has snuggled his way into our Outlander-loving hearts. From the moment fans first saw the man who play Jamie Fraser, we were all smitten, and that’s kept up for five seasons.

That rang especially true when watching this week’s new episode, “Monsters and Heroes,” which featured some of the best acting we’ve ever seen from Heughan on the show.

“Monsters and Heroes” revolves around what happens when Jamie gets a snake bite, with his life hanging in the balance. It’s a nail-biter of an episode, with Jamie only pulling through after Brianna uses her engineering skills to come up with a way to save her father’s life. (Go, Bree!) After his ordeal, he shares his feelings with Claire, the love of his life, in the final moments of the episode, telling her how he made his way back to her.

This immediately became one of my favorite Jamie-and-Claire moments. We’ve been lucky enough to witness a great many, but last night’s may takes the cake. Speaking with Glamour, Heughan talked about this beautiful scene:

"For me, that’s probably the most intimate moment we’ve had for quite a long time. But it’s not them having sex, it’s something deeper than that. It’s hard to find a new way of showing that and expressing that, and that’s certainly what Caitriona [Balfe, who plays Claire] and I pushed for in those scenes."

Jamie and Claire have had a lot of steamy sex scenes over the years, and I think this moment surpasses them all. Well, maybe not their wedding scene from season 1…there’s a lot of competition at this point.

Heughan dived into the specifics of the Claire-and-Jamie moments, including the bit when a feverish Jamie asks Claire to touch him. “What we wanted to do was show that through her touch—I think that she has this ability, I wouldn’t say it’s magical, but maybe it is. She has this healing ability in her hands and in her body. I think it’s her love and her presence that certainly brings him back from the edge….I always felt that the same had happened to him before, on the battlefield at Culloden [in season three]. He sort of took his last breath, and he got a glimpse at the afterlife, but in the end I think he saw Claire.”

Sigh, Jamie and Claire forever.

With everything that’s happened, however, Heughan hints that we’ll see a new side of Jamie and Claire’s relationship moving forward. And it doesn’t sound like it will be all rainbows and butterflies. “I think you see a new sensitivity and intimacy between Jamie and Claire that’s not what you think it’s going to be. It is Outlander and some pretty terrible things happen. If time would only allow them to be together! Then we’d probably explore this more.”

"I think people that read the books know what happens, but even those people are going to be surprised by the way that it’s been shot and the way that we approached it. Jamie and Claire’ll certainly need each other for the next few episodes, and certainly this finale is going to be really testing for them both."

Is it Stephen Bonnet-related? Is something going to happen to Claire? I have so many questions, and I’m not ready for the answers.

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