Sam Heughan (Jamie Fraser) looks back on a particularly gross scene from Outlander season 5 where he had to work with some squirmy costars.
Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) went through the wringer on the fifth season of Outlander. One of his trials included being bit by a venomous snake and nearly dying. As an Outlander fan, those were not a fun couple of episodes, fan let me tell you.
Given the 18th century resources, Claire (Caitriona Balfe) didn’t have many options when it came to healing Jamie. In today’s world, she would have given him antibiotics. And while she did manage to create penicillin during season 5, her syringe was broken at the time of the bite.
In the episode “Monsters and Heroes,” Claire tries to save Jamie’s life by using maggots to pull the venom from his leg. And if you were thinking those maggots were all CGI, think again. During Outlander’s End of Summer series, Heughan and Balfe answered a fan question about this very season, and all the grisly details came out:
Yep, as it turns out, those maggots were very real, and Sam Heughan had to let them crawl all over his leg.
Ew.
Balfe was “fascinated” by the creatures (easy for her to say — they weren’t crawling on her leg!), but Heughan recalled them being very “noisy” and “demanding,” not to mention fast. Is anyone else cringing or is it just me?
"So I had this prosthetic on and you can’t see where it ends so it was just kind of waiting for them to find the edge and get under it. I was also trying to stay in the scene but it’s hard when you’ve got thousands of little maggots charging around trying to get in every crook."
That sounds awful! Couldn’t they have just used CGI for that scene and spared Sam Heughan the agony of dealing with squirmy, loud costars?
Then again, the CGI on this show doesn’t always come across as realistic, so maybe they did the right thing using real maggots, as gross as that is. Thanks to Sam Heughan for being a trooper and giving us a performance as real as they come.
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h/t Express