Jamie Roy and Harriet Slater on romance, rebellion and the world of Outlander: Blood of Blood

After spending an entire season fighting to be together, Brian Fraser and Ellen MacKenzie might have hoped for at least a brief honeymoon period.Unfortunately, this is Outlander – a universe where great romances rarely come without war, bloodshed and several seemingly insurmountable obstacles.Outlander: Blood of My Blood, the prequel to the hugely successful time-travelling drama starring Sam Heughan and Caitríona Balfe, turns the clock back to explore the lives of their characters’ parents before Jamie and Claire Fraser were born.Rather than simply attempting to recreate the original show’s central romance, the spin-off follows two love stories across different periods: Jamie’s parents, Brian Fraser and Ellen MacKenzie, in 18th-century Scotland, and Claire’s parents, Henry Beauchamp and Julia Moriston, whose story begins against the backdrop of the First World War.At the centre of the Highland half of the story are Scottish actor Jamie Roy as Brian and English actress Harriet Slater as Ellen. Slater will already be familiar to period-drama fans from Belgravia: The Next Chapter, while her credits also include Pennyworth and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Roy, meanwhile, previously appeared in Second World War thriller Condor’s Nest before landing the role of the future father of Heughan’s Jamie Fraser.It is no small assignment. Outlander has spent more than a decade building an intensely loyal global fanbase around the Fraser family, meaning Roy and Slater arrived playing characters whose eventual legacy viewers already know, even if much of their own story remained untold.The first season saw Brian and Ellen fall for one another despite clan politics and family expectations standing in their way. Now, just as they are finally able to contemplate a future together, history intervenes.Season two picks up almost immediately after the fiery crosses of the finale signalled a call to arms. With the Jacobite Rebellion gathering momentum, Brian is summoned to fight with Clan Fraser, while Ellen must use the political shrewdness inherited from her father to protect herself and the MacKenzies.“We spent the whole of season one trying to get these people together, and they risk everything and lose so much in the process,” Slater tells The Standard. “Then right at the start of season two, they’re torn back apart again after about five minutes of being together.”The stakes, she promises, get even higher as the clans are forced to decide where their loyalties lie.Harriet Slater and Jamie Roy alongside their Outlander: Blood of my Blood co-stars Jeremy Irvine and Hermione Corfield James Minchin/Starz/Sony Pictures Television“People have to choose which side to fight on,” she says. “So there’s more betrayal, potentially, maybe...”Roy offers a rather more succinct preview: “Everything you expect from Outlander: war, sex, blood, violence, love, romance. All that good stuff.”“What more could you want?” Slater laughs.For the section of the Outlander fandom particularly invested in Brian and Ellen’s romance, Slater has another promise: “They won’t be disappointed.”Returning to the roles also meant the pair approached the show’s intimate scenes with considerably less trepidation. “They were less terrifying the second time around,” Slater admits. “There was a trust, and we know each other so much better by that point.” After an entire season together, the actors knew the crew and intimacy coordinators too, meaning they were no longer performing vulnerable scenes in front of what felt like “a load of strangers”.Roy says the intimacy itself has evolved alongside the couple. “Love changes over time, and these scenes reflect the stage of the relationship that each couple is at,” he explains, adding that he is “pretty pleased” with how they turned out. “Very tasteful.”Not every romantic moment went entirely to plan, however. During one intimate scene, Roy accidentally grabbed Slater’s hair and came away clutching rather more than expected.The pair said to expect ‘war, sex, blood, violence, love, romance’ from season twoGetty Images“Halfway through the scene, there’s a position adjustment, and Jamie accidentally grabbed my hair and pulled out a fistful of my extension,” Slater recalls.With Roy out of shot, the crew could only see Slater suddenly dissolving into laughter as she looked at her “horrified” co-star holding a handful of fake hair.She continues: “It's only me, so I start cracking up because I'm looking at him and he's literally holding a fistful of this fake hair. But nobody else, none of the crews join in because all they can see on camera is me, and they don't understand why I'm suddenly laughing. So that obviously made it even worse... we got the giggles together.”Their on-screen chemistry has also earned Brian and Ellen another marker of approval from the Outlander fandom: the fan-edit treatment.For the uninitiated, fan edits are the painstakingly assembled, often highly romantic videos that take a character’s best looks, lingering glances and pivotal scenes, cut them together – usually in slow motion – and soundtrack the whole thing to an appropriately yearning song. They have become a language of fandom in their own right, capable of turning a few seconds of screen time into a viral TikTok or Instagram Reel.It is familiar territory for Outlander. Over the years, Jamie and Claire’s love story has provided seemingly endless material for editors, with fans recutting everything from the couple’s most romantic moments to Jamie’s more brooding ones. Now Brian and Ellen are receiving the same treatment.The stakes, Slater promises, get even higher as the clans are forced to decide where their loyalties lieJames Minchin/Starz/Sony Pictures TelevisionSlater admits she loves seeing what viewers create, particularly the music they choose, and says she and Roy will occasionally send each other particularly good edits when they appear on their feeds.And the fandom’s handiwork may even be having an unexpected influence on Roy’s performance. One edit devoted entirely to Brian had slowed down footage of the character walking, transforming an otherwise ordinary moment into something considerably more dramatic.“It made me look so much cooler than I actually am in real life,” Roy laughs. “I was like, ‘Damn, that’s badass. I gotta remember that for the next time we film.’”His request to the fans is simple: “Can we do more of these, please? This is great for the self-esteem boost.”With rebellion looming, loyalties shifting and Brian and Ellen separated almost as quickly as they were finally united, season two looks unlikely to make life any easier for its young lovers.Then again, war, sex, blood, violence and romance? As Roy says, that is Outlander.Outlander: Blood of my Blood season two will premiere exclusively on MGM+ on 19 September, with new episodes premiering weekly