Outlander Premiere: Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe Discuss Claire’s Unprecedented Moment of ‘Unraveling’
![[VIDEO] 'Outlander' Sam Heughan, Caitriona Balfe on Season 6 Premiere](https://tvline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/kimberly_final.jpg?w=250&h=250&crop=1)
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Outlander‘s Season 6 premiere.
Outlander‘s Claire has always been really good at shaking off tough times and getting whatever needs to be done, done. But as we saw in Sunday’s Season 6 premiere, even the time traveler sometimes known as Herself has her limits.
“I do think that this is Claire unraveling in a way we haven’t seen her before,” series star Caitriona Balfe tells TVLine in the video above. “She’s always been able to compartmentalize…. We’ve seen this time and time again, to the point where sometimes I’d be like, ‘Is she Teflon?'”
But the kidnapping and gang rape that happened to Claire at the end of Season 5 is, understandably, something still very much on her mind as the Starz series’ sixth season gets underway. “This is something that has really shaken her to her core, and I think these old coping mechanisms that she’s had up to this point, they’re not serving her,” the actress continues.
As viewers saw, Sunday’s premiere ended with an uneasy Claire waking from a nightmare and then going down to her surgery, where she inhaled some of her self-made ether in order to find refuge from the reminders of her brutal attack. (Read a full recap here.)
In the video above, we talk with Balfe about what this self-medication — a departure from Diana Gabaldon’s novel A Breath of Snow and Ashes — means for Claire’s state of mind as the season continues, and then we check in with series star Sam Heughan about how much Jamie knows (and how he’s likely to feel when he realizes what’s going on).
“He expects her to come to him if she, indeed, is struggling or is having trouble,” he says, “and doesn’t expect her to be in quite a bad way as we find out she is.”
Press PLAY on the video above to watch Balfe and Heughan discuss the premiere, then hit the comments with your thoughts!
I wish the writers would stick to the information in the book Claire self-medicating not in the book and the reason Jamie hates Christi not the whole story Christy Is witness to Jamie killing a British guard while in prison come on stick to the book
And she’s back!!! Kim, we’ve missed your recaps and all things Outlander. So happy to have things back on track. Love what Sam and Cat had to say about the unraveling of Claire, which feels so authentic to the human condition. Great questions. So excited for this season.
Why must every character in this show get raped? Yeah, it’s in the books, but why is every character in the books raped?
I lost respect for Gabaldon during a pre-first season panel when they asked her what she was most looking forward to in the book to t.v. series adaptation. Her reply was something like (I don’t recall her exact quote) “seeing Jamie raped by Randall”. That tells you all you need to know.