In the season 1 finale of Outlander, "To Ransom a Man's Soul," Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) is raped in prison by Black Jack Randall, played by Tobias Menzies. Nearly a decade later, that remains one the touchiest, most controversial scenes from the show, and not one that Heughan enjoyed making, as he revealed in his 2022 memoir Waypoints: My Scottish Journey, where he called the experience "harrowing" and "exhausting." He wrote that he didn't think it was necessary to be nude for the scenes, and that the scene sexualized a traumatic moment for Jamie. In the final edit, we only glimpse Jamie nude after the fact, with the more explicit shots left "on the cutting room floor." Still, it left an impact on Heughan, who was spurred to hire an intimacy coordinator going forward.
While speaking with Tobias Menzies about his career for a recent story, The Independent brought up Heughan's comments about the rape scene. The Independent says that Menzies, who's also appeared in The Crown and on Game of Thrones, seemed "taken aback" by the information. “That’s the first time I’ve heard that, that’s sad to hear,” he said. “My feeling about what we shot was that it didn’t feel decorative – it felt earned by what was going on in the drama. I felt that we showed something very, very unpleasant, and honest. It is shocking and certainly we went quite dark with it, but that felt like a way of avoiding the accusations of it being sexualised and titillating. We just made it very, very brutal, which is what that is.”
While Menzies understands the seriousness of the scene, it sounds like, on the whole, he thinks the cast and crew approached it with the gravity it required. Menzies said that the prison scene represented the "fundamental wound" which led to a lot of other stories on the show. “Whether we could have done that by allusion or by reference, that’s a question that was above my paygrade at that time.”
The subject of sexual assault on film and TV is very sensitive, and the thinking around it has changed markedly since 2015, when "To Ransom a Man's Soul" originally aired. That was before the MeToo movement took off in 2017, and before intimacy coordinators on sets were widespread. Also, this wouldn't be the last time that Outlander would feature scenes of sexual assault; the show has been criticized over the years for over-relying on sexual violence as a way to move the plot forward or motivate characters.
The second half of Outlander season 7 will premiere on Friday, November 22. Sometime after that, the show will wrap up with an eighth and final season.
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